more normal than not

A good banana is a marvel.

Custardy…….smooth….sweet.

It’s a miracle that something so good grows on a tree.

Yesterday, I got a very thick-skinned banana in the lottery of produce.

Other than delivering the mail…..and listening to music….and thinking about the past….and all the other things that I do when I’m riding around during the day….I don’t really have a lot of time to consciously eat when I finally get a chance to open my lunchbox.

When I got around to peeling my banana, I was disappointed.

I was shocked.

I was flabbergasted.

The banana part….the fruit….the payoff inside the peel….was skinnier that it should have been.

The peel was too thick.

And, to top it all off, the skinny banana was less appealing than some that I’ve eaten lately.

It was not one of Nature’s premium products this time.

I wasn’t thankful for my skinny banana.

I ate two-thirds of it and threw away the rest by accident when the weight of the peel and the remaining banana confused me and made me think that it was only a fruitless peel.

WHAT A DAY!!

That’s the way it goes sometimes, I suppose.

You don’t know what is behind any peel.

Until you’re eating the fruit, you never know what it is that you got in this life.

You never really know or appreciate what you’ve got until you’ve had the chance to eat the perfect banana and compare.

Maybe I should try to develop a thicker skin and these banana escapades wouldn’t blow me out of the water?

Here’s a twist…a tiny house that is a SLED!!

I loved seeing the process….milling, then using, the lumber to build something pretty unusual.

That was pretty cool.

That, to my eyes, looked pretty unusual.

Though, maybe… a “tiny sled” is the tent du jour up in his neck of the woods?

There may be squadrons of dudes sliding around with a tiny sled house behind their snowmobiles or reindeer.

I don’t know what it’s like for this dude…..up….or across….or wherever he lives.

In the right context, the unusual could be just another walk in the park.

I don’t know about everything.

My mother was pretty sick the last 15 or so years of her life.

(That’s Mom in the center of the picture….the one in the wheelchair…the one with the huge smile….)

That was a hard thing for her to go through….quadriplegia (I never used that word like that before….but Google tells me it’s possible) and the issues that came with that condition were difficult.

She was a scrapper with a fine sense of humor….and we all made it through….but, on the weekend of her passing, we all recognized how much stress we’d been under all those years.

So…..having gotten that information out of the way….HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!!

Maybe what I’m thinking is that the “disease”….the “condition”….didn’t define her.

It didn’t take her out of the “mother realm”.

She never stopped being our mother….even if we were taking care of most of her physical needs.

She could boss with the best….even though she couldn’t get out of bed on her own.

It’s a funny thing….becoming and staying a “mother”.

It starts out hard….and sometimes doesn’t get much easier.

That birth process is a hard thing.

I was there.

I saw it.

I remember that it was a hard thing for Jenny to go through.

(Dudes have it so easy…..”breathe!! breathe!”….)

Anyway….I think that maybe….from the perspective of the distance that maleness gives me….that hard part is given at the beginning of a life so that we can deal with the hard parts that come with the rest of our living.

Maybe that’s the gift of pain…it helps us see that maybe the other parts aren’t so bad?

We celebrate Mother’s Day with flowers….maybe some candy…eating out….but the celebration goes deep.

We wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for our mothers.

That’s heavy.

We wouldn’t exist.

Our mothers were the window that we jumped through to get to this world.

We just took a look with our little baby eyes and JUMPED RIGHT THROUGH THAT WINDOW.

At least that’s the way I remember it.

I was there.

Right, Jenny?

It’s Mother’s Day….and that’s a bigger deal than we give it credit for being.

Thank you for US, Mom.

Thank you for LIFE.

Thanks for EVERYTHING….

I must have had a package in my load for yesterday’s mail that had a quart of molasses in it.

I say “had” because it works on so many different levels.

I had one…..and I had a package that, at some point in the shipping project, “had” a quart of molasses in it.

By the time the day was done, my Jeep had a quart of molasses in it….but it was uncontained….spread around…..sticky on the mail and on me.

Wheeeeeeee.

That’s why it’s important to pack an Amazon shipment carefully…..because, at some point, on down the line, some schmoo like me is going to be in the parking lot of a big taxidermy supply store, frantically trying to figure out why everything is covered in brown sticky goo.

It’s hard to trace the “leaker” when everything is sticky.

Anyway…..the package was the third one I bagged….and by the time I realized the that bagging the first two hadn’t had any effect on stemming the flow, my final tray of mail was full of sticky goodness.

And they wonder at corporate why it takes so long to deliver the mail.

We have a protocol for handling leaking packages….but tasting things that smell familiar isn’t part of the deal…..so I resisted, even though I was pretty sure it was molasses.

It could have bee some kind of sweet and child-friendly paint stripper.

A mailman has to be careful.

Between the dogs and the poison….there are a lot of things that want to kill me out there in the world.

I must stay vigilant.

Here’s a lady out in the woods….talking about lunch and ticks.

I like being out in the woods.

It would be good to eat lunch out in the woods.

I think that I realized something this morning, though.

I worry about what I’m not getting done….even when I’m having fun.

That’s often as far as it goes…..the worrying.

I don’t get stuff done….I just worry.

I need to learn how to “be here now”.

I should be in the moment…every moment.

Of course, my “in the moment” might be worrying about what I’m not doing “in the moment”.

Maybe that’s just how I roll?

What a shame.

What a way to waste a life.

I should be out in the woods….talking about how to eat a tick free lunch.