My Two Bucket Bench

I was out back sitting on my two bucket bench this morning sipping coffee and chastising Maggie once again for finding another disgusting Nature treat in the yard. She was not having any of it. She laid down some thirty feet away from me, placed the leaf covered delicacy between her paws and began to gnaw on it. And then she had the gall to look up at me with her "You're not the boss of me" stare.

I was almost angry enough to get off my two bucket bench and ..... No. Instead, I turned on my come hither voice and finally, on the fourth or fifth 'Maggie Come", she dropped the treat and meandered in my direction, being careful to not look me in the eye. She knew. ............ Yeah, she knew.

I got her to sit within arm's reach and after much cajoling, she turned her head and faced me. I launched into the same speech I always launched when she stuck an ugly bit of something or other in her maw. Using hand gestures and injecting several "Look at me's", I finally gave up. Her vacant eyes told me all those wasted words did not strike a chord with her. For her part, Maggie was satisfied it was over and she immediately found her recent tidbit and laid down facing away from me to enjoy it without recrimination. She knew I was all hat and no cattle. Damn dog.

I went back to enjoying my two day old coffee and the roach from last night and shifting my attention to something else. Problem was I had made the mistake of watching too much news this morning. Watching the news is like passing an accident. I never want to look, yet I always do. My mind immediately refocused on the latest nonsense and dysfunction being dreamed up by our all stars in DC. I had recently promised myself to not let them back into my head, yet there they were, once again worming their way to the top of my attention span. 

I could not let that happen. I had been working too hard lately to free myself from the media's insidious grip on me. The news industry was nothing but a collective of  peddlers and purveyors of the words, ideas and actions of evil people who did the bidding of the really evil people ensconced behind closed doors in smoke filled rooms. The media was the gate protecting the gated community of the unadulterated information from being exposed without the proper twist and pat on the head from the moneyed elite.

I often have trouble emptying my mind. More often than not, my mind is only empty when it shouldn't be. But this morning I concentrated and while I did not empty it, I did succeed in distracting it. 

I looked down on the reclaimed board sitting on the two reclaimed buckets I have been using as lawn furniture these last many years. How long have I had this particular set. Ten years? Twenty years? I could not remember. But I knew it was a long time. 

As I sat and dug for when I had first put a board on two joint compound buckets, I realized that I could remember using a variety of them in the early 1980s when I had a good sized garden producing more vegetables than our two or three dozen boxes of caning jars could handle. I remembered also when I put this particular set together. It was in 2004 when I hacked my secret garden out of the pucker brush on the Southeast side of the property. 

Suddenly my angst over news and events I had no power over disappeared and I relaxed. Life goes on no matter what happens out there and focusing on the bench I was sitting on was the most important thing in my life at that moment.

Keep it 'tween the ditches .....................................................