Knuckling Down and the Circumstances of my Life, Leaving Walnuts on the Tray

Knuckling Down and the Circumstances of my Life, Leaving Walnuts on the Tray

Sometimes you will be trying to do one thing and your mind will detach itself from the given task to begin running merrily down another path entirely. It is Saturday afternoon and after some time spent in the kitchen making and processing pear sauce, I am at last sitting down with my cup of green tea reading my latest selection, a mystery while Chuck Mangione’s “Children of Sanchez” plays in the background.  The mystery is one that I have been trying to finish reading for the past month.  I find that I will have to renew it yet again from the library (guess what, third time is not a charm according to the library, two strikes of renewal is all you get). It is a good read, Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room and I was refusing to give it up until I discovered that I could not renew it.  I was working hard on reading it while my dear husband worked in the kitchen cooking my dinner.  Chicken Enchiladas is on the menu for those who wish to have their mouths watering regarding my meal.  

My distraction is this, this writing. The stuff that keeps filling my mind was so persistent that I finally had to put my bookmarker in the pages of my book and look for a notebook.  Yes, I do use a pen and paper while writing.  It is so much easier to mark out what I didn’t mean to say than the highlighting, the dragging and deleting in my computer.

Knuckling down.  What an odd set of words to haunt my head.  For a bit, I had to return to reading in order to allow the filters to strip out of the way, causing the meaning of the two words to reveal a plan, to lend a drift of coherency to my voice so that  the stitching of letters together might give meaning.

It is at times like this when you are able to reach into the sky and can hold a star in your hand. There is a completeness, a wholeness of being. I like it.  This feeling of being part of everything. I am not sure what it has to do with writing but I end up on a different level somehow when I doing the writing. It seems as if everything is possible.

Well, here it is December 29, 2016, I started this particular blog in summer, in August when the full harvest that comes of the hard work of the farmers in their fields and orchards starts to fill my kitchen with fruits, vegetables and a mad desire to start canning this and that. But now, I am working hard on knuckling down as a friend requested a blog to end the year.  My question is what sorts of expectations and hopes are coming from such a request?  What will pile into my mind and onto the keyboard? We shall see.

I took a couple of hours off from work this morning to put a soup together in the crock pot so it will hopefully be ready for our lunch.  The goodness of the broth from turkey with a large assortment of vegetables and some of the turkey meat chopped up for good measure. It seems to be the one thing that is going my way.

For today has been a day of misadventures that often follows the rush to get ready for work.  The man, my husband, managed to sleep in, and somehow when he does we seem to run out of time getting organized with all of the ordinary chores that we feel necessary to make it out the door.

I had had an idea for such a day entitled, “The Circumstances of my Life”.  It seems relevant to today.  No great disasters but a few small things that happened or didn’t happened.  As most of you know I am living with a gap in my smile due to a broken tooth this summer and the surgery that occurred for a dental implant.  But let me get on with the circumstances of my life. 

It started with breakfast when I was cracking eggs for scrambling.  I had cracked two eggs, opened them into the mixing bowl then I proceed on the third egg, cracking it quickly and very coolly broken it into the compost. When I told my husband, he wisely did not laugh but reminded me that it was a good thing that we had lots of eggs. The scrambled egg sandwiches were good and I was very thankful for the abundance of wholesome eggs in the house. This was item one.

Ah, the circumstances of my life continued after we headed out the door for work.  We made it two blocks before we circled back to check to make sure that the garage door was down for the two great minds in the white Toyota were not sure.  Score one for us.  Door was down. Item two.

We continue down the block to the light.  “My tooth,” I cried, “I forgot my tooth.”  My husband gave me a look wondering if he was going to have to circle the wagons again.  I told him that I would take a break at work and come home to get it, for also, I was planning on coming home to get the soup going.  Item three.  But as we crossed Highway 101 and headed down the street to work.  I said, “I forgot my tea.” This has become known as item four.

This all reminds me of other days, with the tooth forgotten or the day when I wore two different black shoes to work and no one noticed not even me until I was stretching in the break room and happened to look at my shoes quite carefully.  Hmm, good job of dressing this morning.  Another day of my little clothing challenges was while we were on vacation in Ashland for the Shakespeare Festival, I was wearing a short dress with a sweater and finally that night while disrobing that evening I realized that it had been inside out all day, on parade throughout the town, in and out of various restaurants.  I was past embarrassment as the deed was done, the day was done and I was heading to bed.

This all brings me to believe that you sometimes cannot control the circumstances of your life but you need to keep knuckling down and always be willing to laugh somehow, somewhere in your day. 

I seem to be able to control the walnuts that I have patiently waiting on a cookie sheet for me to pick through in order to put them in baggies for the refrigerator.  But I got the walnuts in November and here I am still working on them.  The good news is that my son got his walnuts and hazelnuts in November two weeks after I picked them up.

The walnuts have a migration route.  They are constantly moved from the dining room table where they sit among the clutter of unread books, Christmas cards, a jigsaw puzzle, one emery board, one fleeced purple and pink jacket, two knitted hats and my husband’s laptop, (you get the idea of the treasures hiding on the table) at any rate, they are placed there when I am working on them, then they are put on the washing machine in the laundry room where it is nice and cold to wait for the next chance for me to attend to them.

I find that I have too many things that I want to get done and somehow the circumstances of my life get in the way.  I am fortunate, I realize that each and every day.  It really is the small things that occur each moment to moment that makes the difference.  Which is why I enjoy working with the walnuts, it is a meditative time for me.  I can believe that I am knuckling down to a given task and given enough time this too will be done, completed in some satisfactory way.  So I don’t worry about much else.  The given circumstances of my life can not intrude for this time I am spending at the table.  The only thing that I really need to do with the walnuts is practice my mantra, “Shells, shells, shells.”  This seems to help me put the shells in one bowl without the walnut meat going into the bowl as well.  For whenever I want to put the walnut meat in its bowl, I change my mantra to “Walnuts, walnuts, walnuts.“  It is good to have plan, a routine to keep myself on track.

If I was to put down ideas, goals for the coming year, I can only think of one or two.  To be kind to myself and to my other self, the remarkable man who shares the world with me.  The circumstances of my life come and go, the walnuts will soon be done, and as for knuckling down, well, that will depend on whatever presents itself to me.  Here is to a new year of changes, hope and forgiveness.