So I drove solo up to our lake house with a mission to open the house for the summer season. There is a ton of distasteful cleaning that needs to be done. First order of business, I need to do battle with an army of prehistoric size crickets. Like the Incredible Hulk, they are scary fast and seem to be able to jump or fly over twenty feet at a clip. They show absolutely no fear and there’s no guarantee I will prevail. Yard cleanup is also on the docket. Every year I forget the rhyme that helps me identify which plants are poison ivy. Something along the lines of “Leaves of three will make you p…” In any case I usually wind up scrubbing and then caking myself in itch relieving medicine for three weeks. I love summer.
This year will be particularly fun as we’ve decided it’s finally time to burn old sensitive paperwork that I’ve been collecting from back in the stone age. I’ll also be mustering the strength to go to the dump and part with 20 years of very special crap. As I think about this, both my father and grandfather are rolling over as a lot of said crap was theirs. I’m picturing them in stereo saying, “Steve, don’t do it! You never know when that garbage will come in handy.” It’s an inescapable sickness passed down through generations.
At the end of the first day I walk over to my neighbor for our traditional adult beverage that kicks off the summer. I come armed with three Foster’s Oil Cans, one as a backup in case a third person shows up. Slight change of plans this year, my neighbor is sitting with his wife, and they’re already drinking long island ice teas. Waste not, want not – I finish all three oil cans in what feels like a race. After catching up, no pun intended, I say my good byes and head back to my house in a semi-panic to begin the evening’s festivities…the burning of the ancient tax returns. But as I’m preparing for the tax return incineration, yet another brilliant idea comes to mind: I’ll weed whack the backyard, in the dark. I’m living proof that miracles still do happen. When I awoke the next morning I still had two intact eyeballs, and ten toes.
Distractions fought off, now it’s time for the burning of the tax returns, bank statements, and various civil war era bills that I’ve been maniacally holding onto.
Long story kind of short – you can’t just drop a bundle of paper or checks into a campfire and expect it to explode into a glorious fuel cell that lights up the neighborhood. They clump together and actually put the fire out. Sooo, I needed to “tend” the fire constantly, stirring it up with what started out as a long tree branch, and ended up being a spatula. (I wake up the next morning and no longer have hair on my hands or forearms.)
Final bit of irony – that next morning after checking all of my body parts, it’s time to prepare for “Bulk Garbage Day.” Among other things, I’ll be ridding the house of a massive dog bed that I’m actually questioning why we’re trashing. Then my wife enlightens me that the dog bed has become an Air B&B for mice. So I’m very excited about the opportunity to dig my hands into that one. But there is one other item that I’ve had my sights on for years, a large hard plastic adirondack chair. It has a sadistic hairline crack in one of the seat panels. When you sit on it the crack opens, but when you try to stand up and escape, the crack closes and pinches your butt with the force of a master carpenter’s vice grip. The challenge with this item is its shape and size. It eats up too much valuable cargo space in the back of the SUV. If I’m going to be able to fit Mickey’s mouse motel, some demolition will need to be performed. Luckily for me, I have a massive sledgehammer that during previous engagements has almost taken my head off. I take one swing and as if possessing the might of Thor’s Hammer, the awkward chair problem is solved. New Problem: As much as I amazed myself by wearing safety glasses, unfortunately I was not wearing a suit of armor. When I hit the chair, the plastic blew apart into a ga-zillion extremely sharp ninja-star projectiles, all traveling at mach7. One of these projectiles hit me in the neck, just outside my jugular. You may ask how I knew it was the jugular? The cut across my throat and neck was proof positive.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about daily gratitude. I had become concerned that I’d run out of things to be grateful for. Now I get the feeling that some greater power will soon be sending me a message, “Don’t push your luck pal.”
