Applesaucetasy & Herringsy

Milestones. Markers along the way. The way to where ? I don't know. I just know that the milestones are clicking off one after the other, just as new ones loom into view. For example ?



Well, I passed the Last Big Test™ and have one final project to complete before I've fulfilled the Abîme's increasingly byzantine requirements for board recertification.



I was offered, and ultimately declined a new position at work, one that effectively obliterates the job I've had for 18 years and reconfigures it under another department to which I was to be "leased." This was a long process, not unexcruciating, not without its moments of black comedy, and I'm glad to have come to a decision with respect to participating. What next ? I don't know. Something newish with my current employer that does not involve being leased. Sometime in November.



What else ? The smoldering discontent of my metaphysical life, of course. I have been on the crazy-making cusp of jettisoning church for months and months and months. So is this a milestone ? Or a series of the same milestones that recur ad infinitum, like in the nightmare of long, arduous, wandering travel that brings one back to the Twilight Zone irony of the starting point. Or the TS Eliotian end-and-beginning thingamajiggy. Stay through the end of choir, stay through the summer, stay through the rector's autumn sabbatical, through Advent -- the liturgical year lacketh not for signposts and milestones.



And then there's tomorrow: the installation of DKs new bionic right knee. This has been the biggest peak in the mile-stoned mountain range of of-late, and here we finally are: base camp. Camp Dread, as it is sometimes called. The country beyond is overly milestoned, and full of awful turns and crossroads down which one dreads being shunted. I made the mistake of looking up photos of the procedure (there are many excellent reasons that I am not a surgeon, and squeamishness is one of them) -- quickly returning to the cool simplicity of schematics and the shadow land of xrays.



I thought back to the day we met, and of how a single point in time becomes, sometimes, over time, a cornucopia of blessings -- an every widening horn of plenty -- and like all horns, it opens on emptiness and silence -- and sounds and overspills for as long as it does and no longer.



So, yes, that's a milestone.



I planted sunflowers a month ago. Placed little fences around the sunflower beds. Watered them diligently. I was to be come the Mother of Sunflowers !



Then, one day, I noticed sunflower seed husks around my gardens. Birds had unearthed and gutted the seeds. Except in one small bed there was a cluster of shoots -- was that where I had dropped a handul of seeds ? Was I going to be Mother of Sunflowers after all ?



I visited my flowerbed daily with my green plastic watering pail. I watched the anonymous seedling grow, millimeter by millimeter -- picturing the "12 foot mammoth sunflowers" that would grace our front yard in late summer --



-- until I realized that these were not sunflower seedlings.



They were swallow-wort. Our yard's most ubiquitous weed, famous for completely overgrowing the chainlink fence, not without its charms, but enough is enough already, m'kay ?



So Mother of Swallow-wort trudges on to her next adventure, which will not -- I know this much at least -- involve sunflowers.