Avoidance

I'm at the computer because I'm playing the avoidance game. No, I'm not avoiding anyONE, but rather anyTHING that smacks of work, or more specifically the disaster zone formerly known as the laundry room. I have to dig through a few mountains of stuff to get at the clean laundry I KNOW is under there somewhere to find enough clean clothes that my family will be presentably dressed tomorrow. Blech. I keep hoping that laundry genie will find my house, but so far, nothing. She gets as close as the front door, spots the stray socks and Maddie's dirty panties littering my entranceway, and woosh - she's outta here!

It's worse than usual right now, and thus the avoidance game. Mike has come to tear apart our house and eventually build us a new bathroom. That's all GOOD, but in the meantime it meant that he had to trim a wall in the basement which resulted in the laundry room being turned upside down. Now, if I'd been one of those smart, organized Moms I would have anticipated his coming, would have cleared all the clean laundry from the table next to the wall I KNEW he was going to cut down, and would have made sure all of it was conveniently put away in the respective dresser drawers. But NO, not me! That would be WAY too easy for me. I prefer to do things the hard way, to challenge myself each and every day with new laundry obstacles. So just now I checked each of the dressers and found that Julie has almost a full outfit, except for a pair of socks, Maddie needs the whole she-bang, and Nikki can get by with what she has in her dresser. Sadly, before I go to bed, I've gotta brave Mount Everest of laundry and find something for poor Maddie to wear - or I can abandon her father in the morning with nothing but a pair of pants that haven't fit her for a year, a t-shirt that shows more of her belly than Shania Twain usually reveals, and a pair of socks with more holes than a golf course! Let's see, how long can I make this avoidance thing work?

I saw Debbie on the bus today - the person I used to work with 15 years ago, whom I ALWAYS run into. No, we have nothing in common, and we never INTENTIONALLY get together, but she's one of those people who keeps popping up again and again, no matter where I go. She's forever at the same bus stop - even when we live in different parts of the city. We worked in the same building for awhile, even though it was completely different companies. Wierd. There are some people I know in this city whom I NEVER run into, but then there are the "Debbies" who pop up everywhere.

Debbie was doing a crossword. Not that I have anything against crosswords - lots of people I like and admire do crosswords all the time - but seeing her working on it reminded me of how small Debbie's world seems to be. She's the person who told me that she'd reached the age of 30 without EVER seeing a COW! Now, I can understand that might be the case if you grew up in a coastal or mountain region, but on the CANADIAN PRAIRIES???? In all her life, she'd only been out of the city a few times and had never come across a cow in any of those brief forays into "the world outside her small city". Yikes! I'm sure there are gaps in my own experience - things that would shock people if only they knew (fortunately, I'm good at keeping secrets), but I just can't imagine having a life so small that I'd never seen one of the most common beasts this land has to offer. If she'd never seen an ELEPHANT it would be forgiveable, but a COW?

I hope, really hope, that Debbie is deliriously happy. Maybe she is. Maybe the world scares her and her only happiness is doing crosswords inside the confines of this small city. I know not everyone has to have a world as big as mine, but I have a hard time believing that a life that hardly moves outside the perimeter has as much happiness as life has to offer. But then again, it takes all kinds of people.

I bet Debbie never has to plunge into the heart of Mount Everest to find clean laundry! See, she's got SOMETHING up on me!