I have trod upon the earth for nearly sixty-five years.  The days have brought me along a cursedly circuitous path but not to come back a short way properly.  My sort of long way seems more like the sort which dumps you into the barrel end of a shotgun or a dead-end in the maze.

But just when I feel about as useful as a nozzle on a wooden peg, something like this happens: 

I hear a step on my porch.  I flick on the porch light.  I don’t see anyone. I open the door.  

And there, sitting on my old wooden chair, I spy a bottle of drinking water which my neighbors Helix and Louis have left for me.  Helix thought I seemed dehydrated when we spoke outside the community room at dinner time.  I could drink tap water, of course; but we all prefer bottled and I had forgotten to replenish my supply.  I take the bottle into my house, suddenly smiling, my step a touch lighter, the furrow on my brow easing if only a smidge.

I stand in my kitchen drinking for a few minutes.  Helix might have been right.  The  cool water seems to revive my spirits.  I take my phone from the table and select the message app.  I scroll to Louis’s phone number.  I hover over the text box for a moment.  Finally, because Louis is from France and Helix has become bi-lingual since they got married, I choose the one word which is, in the end, the least I can say: 

“Merci.”

Then I use some of the water to make a cup of herbal tea and take myself off to sleep.

It’s the fifth day of the seventy-fourth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.