I looked around the Tap Room.  Forty people sat on the edge of their seats with bright eyes and open faces.  If the 2017 Rotary International Convention put me in the midst of 40,000 like-minded people, this week’s Waldo Brookside Rotary Club meeting did the same on a microcosmic scale.

It’s worth whatever effort I make, whatever price I pay, whatever reality-dosing I undertake, to commingle with people who share my reality.  My view of life has never changed.  We live on a spider web, each tough silken strand connected to the other.  Nothing spans a greater linear gap than a few inches.  We dart over the gossamer threads.  Chance or something sweeter moves us right, or left; forward or backward.  The dance never ends; the circular structure of the web keeps us in motion.

After the meeting, I stood in my driveway gazing on the healthy crop of volunteer mimosas intertwined with the surprise lilies.  For a dry month, June has given me great bounty in the weeds that climb my ailing fence and tower over the unclipped holly bushes.  The male holly spans the width of the little island, burgeoning and glorious.  A friend trimmed the female so at least she doesn’t seem to hover on the edge of death with brittle brown branches.  Healthy but petite, like me, beside the oblivious fatboy.  My  laughter echoes in the twilight as I pass.

I pause once more, to snap a photo of a crop of tall plants with a delicate flower. I have no idea what it is but I am happy to see that it thrives in my overgrown garden.  Another woman might lament the untamed wildness.  I’m not that woman.  I continue to the house wearing a broad smile.

It’s the twenty-second day of the forty-second month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

 

Not avant garde.
Not nouveau riche.
Not hi-tech.
Just me:
very much the same
and sometimes winning.

c. Corinne Corley, 1980