Tictictictictictic...
Remember this
game? You know, the one by which we instill in our children a
lifelong fear of sudden heart failure? It's called Perfection, and
since the goal is to correctly match all the shapes into their holes
within the allotted time lest the whole game board explode like
a jack-in-the-box on meth, its name seems to imply that anything less
than the nominal perfection is catastrophic, cardiac-arresting
disaster. Good times. That tictictictictic of
the timer still makes my hands sweaty just thinking about it. WHY
CAN'T WE JUST BE VERY GOOD AT SOMETHING!!??
The
reason I bring up Perfection is to evoke the lit-fuse urgency and
dread one feels (one belonging to the Perfection generation, anyway)
whenever there is a limited amount of time in which to accomplish a
large number of tasks. My previous post laid out a few of the many
such tasks to be tackled around Fencebroke. What I failed to mention
is that—tictictictic—there
is a—tictictic—timer
going on in the—tictictic—background
while I hem and haw and dither and procrastinate and wait for the
weather to clear.
For
Spring lies in wait, ticking silently underground, like an impending
subterranean nuclear test blast beneath our feet. At least that's how
I feel. But I
mean, what difference will it make if I manage to relocate a couple
perennials and add a row of bricks to the patio and prune two out of
five apple trees when tictictictic—KPPSHWHOOOMPH!!!—Spring
explodes in my face come April and I can't even find the
rest of the apple trees. Unless I accomplish every. Single. Thing. To
perfection. Then it will all be for nought, it will all be buried
'neath the incoming, supersonic, pyroclastic shrapnel cloud of daffodils and yellow plastic game pieces. That's just the way life works.
According to Milton Bradley anyway. Those folks must have been
gardeners.
