What the World Knows

“There is not one thing I might say to the world / which the world does not already know.”
Brian Turner, Phantom Noise

My backyard beckons while there is so much yet to do inside: chores; daily routines; several concurrent books with bookmarks midway through stacked by my chair; the hobby project dollhouse. There are a rainy winter’s worth of dead leaves on the shallow pitched roof – an invitation to a conflagration when things dry out later in the summer. They make great mulch, but I have to climb up there with a rake and trash bags to bag them, drop them in the yard, then scatter them. If you simply rake them off the roof into the yard, the dust raised covers every surface, including your lungs, and you have more of a mess to clean up. Once, we did just that, raking the leaves into a patio with two open sliding doors: the dust inside was testimony to one of my more depressing mistakes.

And letters to write. It’s been years since I’ve written so much by hand. I send a card each day to my soldier, now about midway through Basic Combat Training. That’s nine weeks of letters. Over the years, I’ve grown accustomed to typing my thoughts, and I’m a fast typist. But writing things in longhand slows me down and I find some sentences are bereft of verbs by the time I arrive at the period. Others end up as mere phrases, their connecting thoughts lost in the mists of the time taken to write the first few words. Is my hand slower or is my mind faster? While the later would please me, the former is more likely the cause of this disjointed handwriting.

And what’s “news” when you write every day, and when the ideal day is one spent fitting floor tiles together in the doll house, or matching wallpaper patterns, or cursing at the abominable Cir-Kit lighting that is so crappy the chandeliers don’t work straight out of the package? Remind me to post a scathing review of these inferior products. I’ve learned how to solder, and even discovered the joys of no-lead solder, but eventually, the electricity confronts the actual light made by this irresponsible company without any apparent quality control. The other kind (of solder) gives me a headache from inhaling the tiny whiffs of lead-laced smoke – and is probably causing more brain damage than the crack I smoke before beginning to tackle miniature electricity. Kidding.

Besides, what gardener in their right mind would spend such a lovely Spring day blogging or Facebooking when they could be outside, chasing the birds from their bird feeders to plant, weed, water, and generally get their fingernails dirty? It’s too nice outside to stay inside and try to blog the world something that it already knows.