Like a Dog

Dirt took me for a birthday ride on his motersickle.  Haven’t been for a ride ride in a long time (my aching hinney today is a testament to that fact).  I can’t even remember when it was that I took a quick ride to Yelm to get something at Sunbirds, I’m pretty sure that was last summer.

Anyway, not moments out of the driveway I remembered why I don’t mind putting on heavy black leathers on a very hot day.  The smells are incredible as we whiz down the highway past deep swampy places, forested places, gardens, farms, hay fields…  There was one place that smelled just like a youthful summer, asphalt, grass, cattails, lily pads, water.

Just amazing how quickly the fragrance of the land changes from one thing to the next.  In just the little bit of our east west highway from our driveway to the junction with the north south highway, we went through dozens of different fragrances.  Somewhere in the middle of the three mile stretch I said, to no one in particular, “I know why dogs stick their heads out car windows.” 

Like a dog I was, sticking my head above Dirt’s, smelling, smelling… Until wham! a bug caught me right on the nose.  It felt like someone threw a rock at me! Ow.  Dirt musta heard me say ow,  because he told me to keep my face behind the windshield area.  So I did.  For a while.

Along comes Monday, birthday fun weekend is over and it is back to all the work that I am constantly behind on.  Looking forward to that week some where in mid December that equalizes everything in the garden for me and then there is no more being behind. 

Until about the third week in January.  But then that is my life and for some strange weird reason, I like it, actually I love it, I love my crazy working-hard and not-getting-rich-doing-it life. 

I’ve been hearing quotes lately that make me feel a bit better.  One that says, “If I finish what I have planned, clearly I didn’t plan enough.”  Amen to that!  I have no idea what I would do if I actually didn’t have a plan, or three or four, that at the end of the day I have to decide what to do with it: chuck it, move it, think about what to do with it.

Here’s another quote on a different vein.  (I’ve never really thought of work in the pejorative and so I appreciate when others don’t as well.) This comes from business organizer  time-management wizard, David Allen of Getting Things Done, when asked what should be taken care of, what is seen as work and therefore worthy of a file or note, he says, “anything you wanna get done, that ain’t done yet.”  He goes on to say, if you want a puppy and you don’t have one, getting one is work, and who doesn’t love to do that?!  

There is a lot in our lives that comes under that heading, including sleeping.  I want a nap, it isn’t done yet.  It’s all work.  So I continue to work like a dog, because all that I do is work, getting things done, that aren’t done yet, and I like it that way.

Picking cucumbers in the hot sun is the most unpleasurable thing to do, but clearly I love doing it. (I do think it actually makes my pickles taste better, the “suffering” to get them).  I don’t really have to grow them.  I could easily say, “forget it, get your pickles from somewhere else please”.  Those prickly bushes are horrid and on a hot day, in long sleeves and long pants still very horrid.  But I love my pickles and I have a fond wish to get pickles in other peoples’ refrigerator, so I pick on.

I know some very lazy dogs.  They choose not to work.  Then I know many dogs that invent work.  Sheep dogs that when they run out of sheep to chase, herd the neighbor children.  Rat Terriers that when there is no vermin to root out go after snakes or chase frogs off the pond’s edge.  No body asked them, they do it until they are exhausted, and then rest and do it again.  That’s me. A little of both most likely, I’m a good lap dog – hey it’s work isn’t it?  And I work like a dog too.   Sometimes I have to be reminded to pull my head in the car though.