IT’LL ALWAYS BE THE UNDERPANTS SHOVEL TO ME

by Lisa

 

I spilled the morning’s coffee sideways across my legs in the car, so I grabbed the nearest cloth-like thing to blot: a woven woolen lap blanket.  I don’t know what that thing was washed in before it came to live with me, but the word “Simonize” comes to mind.  My jeans absorbed the repelled milky nectary goo.  They came off in the parking lot of a gas station, and a towel from the trunk became my seat for the morning’s drive.  My underpants look like shorts, and today was sunny and warm.  Air moving across my bare legs made me smile.  I’ll wash the jeans in the sink tonight, and the blanket.

I carry laundry supplies, too.  Regular domestic MacGuyver here.

Funny how a thing like a spill can make people angry.  I spill often.  So does my small person.  Should I get angry at myself, at her, for having arms that reach a few inches further than we expect?  For taking a corner too fast and sloshing a drink?  For clapping when we laugh and spinning a bowl off the edge of the table? Instead, away from home I carry a change of clothes and Tide and towels and an elastic clothesline a la Rick Steves.  At home, we just blot with experience and some degree of expertise.

Good things happened today.  I found a shovel on the road, and a wire lazy susan, rusty but smooth-spinning,  for a punch bowl and cups or a tureen and bowls.  I needed a shovel for the car.  The other thing will become something else.  The “what” doesn’t matter, ever.  It’s none of my business yet.

How’s that for creative process?

What can we gather from this almost-asleep pile of words?  I spilled my coffee, which resulted in my driving pantsless and getting honked at by four truckers.  Each time, I jumped.  Those horns are loud.

Feeling warm sun and cool spring air on my shocked legs made the odd situation…nice.  I couldn’t stop, of course, until my clean pants were excavated, but hopping out to grab that shovel and lazy susan went unseen.  So, here I admit to running around in my underpants to gather rusted metal things from the side of a deserted road.  Boy shorts, really.  Girls wear cutoffs shorter than today’s underthings.

I need to swish those sugary-milky-coffee things in some soapy water, soon.  I need to go to bed, soon.

I hate to go to bed.  Another cup of coffee, maybe this time drunk instead of splashed, would solve the problem, but need overrides hate.  Tomorrow, there will be new coffee, new cream, new sugar, maybe new treasures like that lazy susan on my morning walk, maybe one of those sticks that grew like a corkscrew with a vine embedded into its flesh.

Maybe-good trumps probably-bad.  Knowing how to blot up the mess makes the mess maybe-not-a-mess.

Maybe the sun and wind flipped some important switch in my winter-shredded heart today.  I’ll probably find out tomorrow.