This morning's (spontaneous) great physical grunt was interrupted by a sweet east-german accent; the grandma of baby next door was calling out to me in my work-trance, singing:
"Are you fighting with the leaves, today?"
I grinned her my best angelic yes and she ran back inside to hide from the cold and suddenly my rythmic chore of rake, rake, scoop, stuff into yardwastebag, rake, rake, rake turned into a great tumult of thought and counter-argument.
One moment I'm raking leaves from the roadside in front of the house because for once there's nobody parked there, chatting with the work crew across the street, thinking about my job interview tomorrow and what do I really want next from my career and the next moment suddenly...
...I'm lost in the extra disk from last night's Lord of the Rings boxed set, I'm seeing visions of the countryside that inspired the shire, and I'm battling leaves, battling nature, fighting with all that is green and good and turning the road into a mess of black mud...
...and acting very much like the metaphor which Sauron, and even Saruman, stood for.
Arms straining against the heavy wet of the leaves, biceps bulging, back screaming stuttering protest, the jaunty yellow layered across the sidewalk, street, driveway, everyway, eventually gave way to black muddy rain-soaked and half-decomposed mush, and I scooped it up with my desiger leather gloves into hulking paper bags and relived last night's horror
of sitting before a television, curled up beatifically with a climbing-broken Mr. Pyke, and suddenly realizing just how much I am capable of ignoring, forgetting, for the sake of my own advancement.
Watching the advancement of the industrial revolution flat across the screen of a television set, the great smoke spires threatening the shire were all too vivid despite the pallor of the medium.
Lying there with one arm still twiching from my first try at a serious incline, a great cloud of guilt detached itself from the screen and billowed at me with all the rage of a fifteen year old moi, back when I used to care, really care.
Fifteen,sixteen, umpteen years since I started asking and the questions haven't left me yet no matter what lessons and excitements I mute them with, "What am I doing here" the wind in my airy head whimpers out of tune. What am I doing in The City, what am I doing for the world, what am I doing here other than contributing to the black sludge that we are all driving ourselves into?
Despite the wonder of that extra DVD, the way it showed me so many of the reasons that I should give Dr. Tolkien some slack, the way it taught me to appreciate the worlds that I'd always known were beautiful and complex - but never quite understood HOW complex and how deeply tied to my own life, despite the way it helped me realize that the teasing images that flitted away from me all through my first reading were right on track with maybe a few other people's interpretations...
But I'm losing myself to analysis.
Despite all that this morning's romp through the leaves had only a few moments of melancholy, contributed to by Sunday's realization of how dangerous they can be, added to by their sheer weight and muddiness.
I still got to play in leaves, for my first time ever, the first time I've ever lived in the shadow of a tree, let alone one this immense.
I am looking forward to planting purple tulip bubles interspersed with the occasional yellow ones along the edges and helping Mr. Pyke cover over the rest of the grass with the great pile of yellow left over in the driveway.
I like the way a little bit of purely physical work lets my brain run a little wild, gives me the tiniest sense of having accomplished a small but important thing, and wandering back inside to warmth and a loving stork of a man in his white bathrobe coming down the stairs to see where I'd disappeared to is just a huge chunk of warm and wonderful.
Not very exciting or world changing and maybe not all that important either, but...
...but every nibble of happinness will help me get further along to doing those, won't it?
And besides.
I like experiencing the stranger things.
Strange to me, at least --
like the bright beet salad sitting in the fridge, a little too spicy at the cost of a burnt-bottomed pot in the sink, but bright and beetlike nonetheless.