Leaf Piles of Failure

Yesterday was one of Those Days, the kind you can’t help laughing over when retelling even though you really want to weep. To get my mind off of writer’s block and the subsequent gloom-and-doom of my future, I spent over a significant chunk of day cooking, peeling, and pureeing pumpkin. I whipped up two loaves’ worth of spicy-sweet pumpkin bread batter and deposited them in the oven… at which instant the oven breathed its last. I had to leave the kitchen as-is, heaped with dirty dishes and unbaked bread and orange splatters aplenty, to pick Natalie up from school, and then it took us over two hours to get back. A certain three-year-old—no names, but you catch my drift—dragged her feet to the extent that I pushed two girls with the stroller up-up-uphill. First to one store, then to another, then uphill yet again for an essential we forgot. A certain eleven-month-old—again, no names—threw her hat as we were crossing a spectacularly busy intersection, and the resulting car honks and angry shouts made me die a little inside. Then the stroller tipped over at the park, our grocery bag burst, and we all limped back to our pumpkin-besmeared home spewing a trail of white sugar in our wake. That was when the doorbell rang.

I’m learning that all you can do with a day so determined to be a failure is to let it. Roll around in its messiness and stupidity like a pile of fall leaves and have a blast scattering them to the wind. (Though honestly, I have hated rolling around in leaf piles since I was eight and realized that they probably contain bugs. And also dried leaves, which are awfully poky. And also bugs. Nevertheless, the metaphor stays.) Once I get over my unreasonable expectations, such as productivity and basic hygiene, failure days can be kind of fun. And the best news? Hours away is a brand new day that, chances are, has already learned to behave itself.

(I may acquire a taste for optimism yet… Who would have guessed?)