In Mouse Meadow there are the over- and under-ground tracks of mice, voles and shrews. I remember learning with amazement that shrews are the fiercest creatures in the world for their size. I fished a lifeless little Elephant Shrew out of our swimming pool in South Africa once and when I examined it, noticed a faint expanding and contracting of its little lungs. So I sat on the grass and gently rubbed it dry, warming it in my hands, marvelling at the sensitive dainty ears with their gossamer fur, the delicate long legs with their tiny-toed feet, the elongated nose, the soft white underbelly. After a while its eyes opened, then seemed to focus, and in an instant it looked directly at my large face looming over it, and shrieked loudly (well, loudly for a shrew)! I too screamed with fright and let it fall from my hands on to the grass where it ran off as fast as it could go (which is surprisingly fast). They are mostly solitary creatures, and the females usually give birth to twins (I can identify with that), sometimes twice a year. They have a long gestation period for a small mammal, two months, but the babies can do almost everything they need to after only a couple of days, just tinier versions of the tiny adults.
It is strange how upset we get when
things go wrong. Well, depending on our characters, some people get more rattled than others. Tim, for example, rarely becomes unglued. The other night I had a series of mishaps on the way to bed
(and no, alcohol was not involved), knocked over my teacup (empty) when I got
up off the couch, tripped up the stairs, forgot something downstairs and had to
come all the way down again, then it all culminated in me placing the bottle of
laundry detergent on the little bathroom table and missing, like a monocular
person with no depth perception, so that the bottle, although made of plastic,
shattered and proceeded to leak white goo all over the floor.
(If
you were to think about the state of the world you would just want to
die immediately, it is so awful. There is constant war. There is
always torture. Elephants will be extinct within 10 years if poaching is not stopped. There is the horror of Human Trafficking. There is the inconceivable practice of Female Genital Mutilation. Every drop of ocean has plastic suspended in it. There are terrible
leaders of countries, there are horrible fathers, there are nasty
mothers, there are cruel aunts, atrocious guardians. The trees are being decimated, frogs have too many legs in the Chesapeake wetlands. We live in a world where children can be merciless and sadistic, where there are eight stage of genocide, so that it can't be declared a genocide until the country has reached a certain level of atrocity, like a video game.
But it is impossible. We can't live like that. We can't carry the awful world on our shoulders. We can't focus on the bad, otherwise we couldn't live. We have to 'always look on the bright side of life, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da!")
Matthew was
brushing his teeth and laughed at my discomfort, and so I ended up laughing
too, and it struck me that it makes no sense to get your knickers in a knot
about things going wrong, little things. Because it is no surprise really, even ordinary life never runs
smoothly, it is filled with spilled coffee and broken promises, little
accidents and big disappointments. And the reason why life is so bloody
marvellous sometimes is because we have these setbacks with which to compare
the wonderful. And we must hang on to this, the cat's pyjamas, the hunky-dory, the extraordinary in the every day.
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| Luna and her daddy |
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| My boykies! |
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