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Dirt Therapy

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I got a call this morning that really made me mad.  Nope.  It made me furious!  I stomped around the house mumbling expletives and yelling at the other person as if they were in the room with me.

My husband and my dog snuck outside to hide and that’s when I decided I need some Dirty Therapy.  I grabbed a spade, my garden gloves and the packets of seeds I’d ordered last winter.  Heading outside I tore into the old vegetable beds, shoveling compost and turning the soil.

I continued to curse as I knelt on the ground — well, my idea of cursing which went something like this:  “Wrasser, frasser, stupid woman.”

Throwing my garden gloves to the side I dug my hands into the dirt, pausing occasionally to shake my fist in the air and shout at Stupid Woman.  The neighbor’s dogs came to the fence to stare at the crazy human rolling in the mud.  I accepted them as my audience and began anew.  “I mean, really?  How dare she?” I asked.  They agreed Stupid Woman was totally out of line.

A few hours later, as I worked the soil, loosening the clumps, letting the fine soil run through my fingers, my temper  and my conversation cooled.  I looked up at my doggy spectators and ruminated, “Perhaps, and I  mean – just perhaps.”  Here I stuck a dirty forefinger in the air for emphasis.  “I’ve done one…”  the dalmatian cocked his head to the side.  “Okay, maybe two things in my life that might possibly have irritated another person.”

Disgusted with my lack of insight, they wandered off and I concentrated on placing the tiny seeds in the furrows.

Yes, my hands are dirty and sweaty and my hair is sticking out in Crazie style, but I feel a hundred times better than I did this morning.  I’m even working on thanking Stupid Woman – because without her I’d probably never gotten my garden planted.

 

P.S. – If any of you called me this morning, of course YOU are not the stupid woman I’m talking about.

Crazie Toad’s Wild Ride

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I am back in Crazie Town after a whirlwind trip to New York City.

Crazie Town's Sister City

I cleaned out my purse when I got home and here’s what I found.

**Boarding pass for the flight where I’m pretty sure I slept so hard I drooled on myself.

**My ticket stub to Rising Stars.  The Laguardia High School for the Arts annual talent show.  It was AMAZing.  One guy came on stage and played guitar like I’ve never seen. He transported himself and the audience to another space and time.  And, oh yeah, he’s 15 and he’s going to Laguardia for his art, he just plays the guitar for fun.

**A shuttle pass to get me from one subway station to another.  The “L” was closed for the weekend and I was trying to get to Brooklyn to visit one of my brothers.  I was with a friend who valiantly attempted over and over again to get us there on the subway but we finally bailed and climbed into a cab.

We gave him the address and he said “Where’s that?”

I paused and said, “I have no idea,”

“Well,” he said.  “You’re the one who wants to go there, not me.”

**The receipt for the craziest most useless watch I’ve ever purchased.

**A ticket stub to the Natural History Museum.  While holding my 7-year-old niece’s hand she said “Mimi, when I see a caveman it makes me want to learn about dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs make me want to learn about rocks.  And, rocks make me want to learn about outer space.”  As for me, I was just trying to make to the food court to get a snack.

**Drawing of me and said niece as mermaids.

**Restaurant receipt for a local diner where I ended up eating breakfast twice in one day. Once at 9 am and once at midnight.

**Hand written directions for a car service.  I seem to have the worse Car Karma ever.  My friend told me she’d ordered a car for me to take me to the film site where my brother was shooting Person of Interest.

“No problem,” she said.  “They know where it is and they have GPS if they get lost.”

I climb into the waiting (GPS free) car and the first words of broken English out of his mouth were.  “Where are we going?”  Thank goodness for smart phones as I looked up the location on the internet and wrote them out for him.  He was so diligent about taking me to the exact address that he drove onto the set to let me out.

**The program for Now.Here.This.  Another brother is the musical director of this Off-Broadway play and I got to attend the first preview of it.  Not to brag, but it was the best musically directed play I’ve ever seen.

In between all of this, I walked approximately 400 miles of concrete sidewalks, I changed sleeping quarters five times, I learned how to take the subway all by myself and, sadly, I discovered a book about monsters that appears to be almost an exact duplicate of the children’s book I’ve been working on for two years.

It was a wild ride and although I loved every minute of it, I am happy to be home where I can look out my office window and see green grass, where I can drive my car the 50 yards from one store to the other, and yes, my dear friends at WTF Critique group, where I can finish the last few paragraphs of my book.