Friday 4th March 2022 – The Little Things

A dog or two on the sofa to snuggle

I hold onto the little things, the little things are the things that anchor me and remind me there’s a point to carrying on. The world seems to be falling apart in so many ways—there’s the pandemic, now endemic, but is still killing people and causing rifts between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers or maskers and anti-maskers.

I take an avocado from the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, and I gently squeeze the tip of it the way my mother taught me. “Never squeeze the whole thing or you’ll bruise it.” I feel it yield, so I take my sharp knife and cut around it, it opens to form two perfect pears, one filled and one empty. It is the rich green of a 1970s bathroom suite and I test the edge to see if I can peel it. Some avocados have to be scooped out, this one peels perfectly, very satisfying. I slice the flesh; it has a pleasing softness. In the other half the great big shiny seed protrudes like an enormous brown blister. I lift the fruit in my hand and then whack the seed with the sharp edge of my knife, it slices in with a thunk and I twist—the seed pops out.

Let’s Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer, the song goes through my head, now it’s stuck in my ear, I’ll be singing it for the rest of the day—could be worse; some days I get things like Old Macdonald had a Farm stuck in there.

How a virus can be political is beyond me, it’s a fucking virus, it only wants to reproduce and find the ideal place to breed and grow, and it does that very well. It also knows how to mutate to avoid being stopped and to improve its own chances of survival. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.

A little dog nudges my leg with her nose. “Is it lunchtime Candy?” I ask her. She looks up at me with her little button eyes. They have a slightly crazed look, and she does her little dance when she pretends that her tail is a wild animal. She jumps around to catch it, but it’s way too quick for her. She spins the other way but misses. She gives up and licks my toes instead.

Then there’s this stupid war.

I was worried when Trump had his finger on the little red button in the final flailings of his failing dictatorship, but now we have another madman who is even more of a risk, who seems to know no other authority than his own. A madman who has rewritten history and has walked into another country to claim it as his rightful land.

I think of my father, and I think of the desperation that caused him to take a leap of faith. When there could have been a gun pointed at his back, he walked across a checkpoint into the American sector and began his escape. On the shelf, I spy, with my little eye, one of the books that I rescued from his enormous collection. I trace the Cyrillic letters with my finger, I have no idea what the title is—there’s a horse on the cover.

The threat of global warming hangs like impending doom and every day another species goes extinct. In the last few years, we have lost so many. Let me consult my old friend Google…

I pass the sofa and sink my face into the fur of the dog that lies there. The doggy smell is comforting, and the softness of her fur is a sticking plaster for my soul A soul that seems to be leaking so much now; it gets thinner and thinner with every new disaster—Is it because I’m getting old? Being in the moment with my dogs rescues me and yet I find myself thinking, what if the war spreads and I have to make a choice between leaving or staying, what would happen to the dogs? They can’t walk that far anymore. My eyes start to leak now.

…Spix’s Macaw and the Pyrenean Ibex have gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds. I wonder if they will be hunted or left in peace—who is a hunting ground happy for, surely not the hunted?

 

A group of Ukrainians comes blinking out of an underground shelter to view the result of the night’s bombings. They get down to work mixing Molotov cocktails.

 

…The Moorean Viviparous Tree Snail, the Little Mariana Fruit Bat, and Bachman’s Warbler, they sound like songs, pop groups, or even full-blown operas. I hum a tune. It starts out as something cool and jazzy but turns into a full-throated version of Old Macdonald with all the animal sounds. The neighbours must think I own a menagerie.

 

Boom! And a bomb hits a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The whole world ducks and then sits up to see if it will be a disaster worse than Chernobyl.

 

…The Flat Pigtoe Mussel and the Turgid-Blossom Pearly Mussel. So many mussels. Who invents these names? Perhaps that is why they are extinct, they died under the weight of those resplendent monikers, but I suspect it has more to do with deforestation and lack of habitat.

 

I pull myself back out of the rabbit hole and fill the watering can. I start watering the houseplants. Some of them are far from happy—my house is too dark. The irony of the belting sunshine in July and August as opposed to the cave-like dark of this old Andalusian home. There is no more room on my patio or in the front of my house. I tell the plants that I am sorry, but they will have to sunbathe in rotation.

 

And old BoJo has somehow dodged the 'Partygate' bullet. Who are these scum who float along on the surface of the hardship of the rest of the world?

 

I feed the dogs and finish preparing my salad. I take time chopping the vegetables. Mindfulness—it’s all about savouring the life we have, while we have it. It slips by so fast. I mark another ‘dry’ day on my calendar. I smile at the girls. "Now, that is something to celebrate." They stare into my soul.