Claratin D and gutter-al gutter talk
Ode to a Neighbor's Gutters ! ! !
You know how the spring winds make those little whirli-gig spinning things go all over; I mean all over, cause my neighbor's little maple tree sends out these spinning spawning seeds on wings by the thousands. No, the hundreds of thousands, no more--you go count them next year, disbeliever. I am not going to stop you. That tree spins them out by the millions, the billions—a trillion seeds come off that one little maple tree in a year flying around like locust come to take back the air from those of us paying to live and breathe around here. Well, I can tell you, every spring with all that fluttering spawning spinning going on I get allergies (sound like a big nose full of wet tissue, become a wheez-er, a static breather). When I can't take it anymore, I break down and take Claratin D which as anyone knows is allergy medicine. We must sign up to buy it. Know why?
Because dopes (dope-heads) make Crystal Meth from it; a highly addictive drug. So after I go to the local pharmacy and stand in line with a good wad of tissue stuffed in my leaking nose, my face half hidden like a Taliban wanna-be (o.k. not funny) and feeling like a drug addled criminal with the shakes. I swipe my driver's license in a digital reader, and sign a notice that I promise not to make any speed or meth with my twelve day supply. I mean really! Look at me mr. man behind the surveillance camera I am stuffed up like a clogged toilet... I am dripping, looking like a hound dog without bark or a bite. Wave at the surveillance camera, hello to you mr. 1984, here is my photo, here is my driver’s license # and its i.d. tag, here is my iris and my finger print, here is my signature and my credit card, you want a blood sample? Urine sample? Do you need anything more to find me?No sooner than I pay I am out in the car, engine running trying to get that Claratin D out of its little airless sack and into my mouth, open up the diet coke and swill it down. Ok maybe I drink Aquafina, but in this situation the diet coke is more dramatic, so tuff. My nose needs oxygen, to breathe well makes a lot happier person. You know man can not live on bread alone, she does need air. Nonetheless, Claratin D will act like a sugar caffeine nicotine adrenalin rush on my body; so I may not make crystal meth and sit around all half-coked out of my mind with my little white pill—but since my body is generally drug free this stuff does make me speed up. Like rocket fuel in an un-manned go cart, away I go.
Its the ladder I get out first, the big one a woman usually leaves for the roofers or the men who know what a scaffolding is; then I get the bucket and a little trowel used for gardening and cause I am all jazzed up on my new nose decongestant and that same nose decongestant legally enters my bloodstream, brain and heart--I can easily knock down those gutters and mow the lawn and clear the deck of millions, no trillions, qua-drillions of whirli-gig maple seeds all in one ... minute... I mean afternoon. This drug is a bored housewife's dream, cause it is NOT that I want to do all these chores at once, my gardening gloves covered in muck, my knees tortured going up and down the ladder steps. ... I can't help myself! My mind and my hands are all abuzz and if I were a bee the whole planet would be smeared a bright light capturing sweet gooey goodness from a Claratin D week of making honey overtime with all the other drugged out Claratin D drones.By the end of yard work, I’m exhausted. But because I bought the Claratin D 24 hour dose instead of the 12 hour version (which usually wears off by bedtime) (but was sold out) I can't stop moving. I try to sit, to rest, the mind racing at the speed of blur, I think if only "I took this stuff in college I would've graduated early!" I close my eyes and see masses of millions of zillions of one winged maple seeds go whirling past my inner eyes. They will never spawn anything now. Bagged and sent to the dump, maybe they could spill open and catch root on top of all the American tossed out garbage peels and un-recycled. A noble idea, to plant dumps green by sending our maple seeds away in bio-degradable bags or some other subtle non-violent tactic. Its one way to plant a tree for Arborist day, but what are the chances? If just one of those billions of trillions of seeds did indeed root in at the dump it would be like that philosophical tree standing alone in a forest asking, "Do I live?” “How do I know, if nobody ever climbs me?"
Kind of the way a blogger feels waiting for feed back (I'm guessing cause this is only my first week) but the idea of writing this is about the maple seeds. The world is full with many kinds of seeds. We are all seed ideas spawning seeds and we give birth to them one by one as we speak and create and share them. The seeds we spawn and tend, the seeds we send out, act just like the multiplicity of winged seeds the maple flings into the wind, trusting they will land and root in. Just by the sheer existence of our own creative pulse we should trust that our creativity deserves its own selfhood (its right to exist) because we have pulled it from the within; it has traveled against all odds to be born here; to show to us, as mirrors from the unknown inside us, a new aspect of our own face, hand, mind's capacity to create--to make a new place or way, to better our livings.Not everything we do should and could root in, like the millions of seeds in any spring, like in a green pepper, an apple, a watermelon (imagine them all at the dump sprouting in); like in the sperm, the womb, an education, not all our creative endeavors will bloom but those tended will often grow other seeds in the next season. This isn’t new info. But sometimes we are surprised by what has cross pollinated within us, by engaging with others. Bloggers--(I talk to all of u) some one of us must be doing something that not only satisfies ourselves and our own creative need but one other, at least! Or two, or three or like the actual maple tree which has outside my window, within eyesight of its own growing grandeur, spawned a whole family of little sprouts; likewise some of us are (or will) reach countless. (but not you poor Mr. Peanut--see Spoonfullofsugar's blog in the blogroll)
I swear the conservationist in me might just crawl up on a ladder in the middle of the night, maybe on a night like tonight while the moon is big enough to cast a bit of light, and steal from my neightbor's gutters. I could scoop each small tree life up by the little white roots in a garden tool, put them by the hundreds, no the thousands, the trillions into the backseat of my vehicle and drive around the city with friends to plant them each in a place where someone's eye, someone's imagination and hope for a greener world might appreciate them. Someone might water one. It might also surprise someone to find a sudden tree in a spot that before had been barren or stop someone in a path they walk daily without seeing their surroundings anymore. Each found infant-maple could be tended then, enjoyed. It would take some work, but it might be fun. This world is full of seeds, each if allowed to blossom, grows into a seed bearing entity and such are we, variety by variety, no catalogue could classify, while on and on we become bound and circled in by the bounty.
