This is what I tell people: Life is often beyond my control, and I accept that. I am not obsessive about the things I cannot change. I have learned to give in and let nature take its course.
This is the truth of the matter: In my old age, I have become complacent. Lazy, even. When I was younger and more energized, I kept my physical and emotional lives in rigid order. Nothing out of place. And while I’ve come to see that there’s a lot of chaos in the world, and I know that sometimes that’s interesting and even productive, the fact of the matter is that if I weren’t so lazy, I’d be trying to amend things to suit my needs. I’d also be driving myself crazy and giving myself ulcers. (I had my first at age nine, but that’s another story.)
In the photo above, on the left, you see what I see every afternoon: shadows of the Virginia Creeper climbing across my shaded kitchen window. On the right, you see the Virginia Creeper in question and that it is not only climbing across the window, but also inside it. Our house is being invaded, covered, slowly but steadily. And I have yet to do anything about it.
I suppose if it were a life-threatening kind of thing–if, say, those were poisonous asps instead of vining tendrils–I’d probably have addressed the problem by now. But they’re not asps, and I’m lazy, and just look out that window: do you see our neighbor’s yard, which is one giant mass of aggressive, insidious flora? It is daunting, to say the least.
Maybe I need a nap.
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