This week brought its own batch of lessons. If I write them down, maybe I won't forget them (again).

Sometimes people get what they ask for.

I really like Brooke, the new nurse practitioner I see for doctoring; she's thoughtful, interested, and not afraid to share her own opinions. So when I told her I was joining the gym again—a membership I had left behind during COVID—she thought that was a great idea.

I explained that I really liked having an early morning place to walk; I don't think our neighborhood is dangerous, by any means, but I'm nervous walking during the dark Animals' Hours. There is, in particular, a huge (in small city wildlife terms) white beast we think is a venerable skunk, but a neighbor says he's sure it is a badger. That neighbor puled the cover off his grill one night, and out strolled the sturdy white beast, teeth bared.

The neighbor went inside, and his family decided take-out would be much better that evening than grilling.

Badger or skunk, I want NOT to meet that perambulating patriarch, especially in the dark. And the bucks are a little addlepated this time of year; the squirrels are just manic.

And then, the weather is changing, and the walkways may be slick soon. It's a good season to get up early and go to the gym to walk on the indoor track.

And Brooke endorsed the idea of using the indoor track, but she suggested that, since I was at the gym anyway, I ought to look into lifting some weights—that being, she said tactfully, a very good thing for a person of my age to do.

Off I went to the gym, and I strode around the track. As I did, I watched the serious lifters putting these impossibly heavy weights onto torturous looking machines. And I saw others working with dumbbells and still others using the fitness machines, which were an island of mystery to me. As I walked, the weights crashed and people muttered low and I realized I knew nothing about the Land of Weights.

I wished I knew where to start.

And the second day I was there, a respected former colleague stopped me and invited me to join his once-a-week core/strength class…where one learns to lift weights correctly and how to use the mysterious machines.

So I did that, and it only took me three or four weeks to realize that the thing I had wished for had plummeted down from the sky and landed at my feet.

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And that was kind of like Jim, fresh from a disappointing collegiate experience, being drawn into a wonderful group of writers and readers by his caring former supervisor. It was exactly the tribe he needed at exactly the right time.

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And then yesterday, our whole staff (all three of us) went out in search of wonderful local goodies with which to gift some special people. Pam and I were at a lunch café-bakery, and it was just about noon, and we were waiting right by the rounded glass counter that is full of home-made cookies—cookies as big as a saucer, at least.

"Those cookies look SO GOOD," muttered Pam, and I tried to angle myself away so I didn't have to look at them. Fortunately, the staff there was terribly efficient, and we were quickly served and out the door, local goodies (but no cookies) in hand.

Back at the office, we all got our lunches out. Pam said, after she'd finished her healthy meal, "I DO wish I had one of those cookies."

And then a FedEx truck pulled up, and Pam went to greet the delivery person, who greeted her cheerily and handed her a pleasingly heavy box and hurried off to continue his deliveries.

Pam brought the box into the lounge, and we got scissors to open it, and I'll bet you know what was in it: cookies. Amazing cookies, plump and broad and studded with treasure.

We picked the toffee-chocolate cookie and put it on a dessert plate (the cookie was actually wider than the plate) and nuked it for 25 seconds. Then we split that cookie three ways and we ate our portions with forks, because the chocolate and the toffee oozed in the most wonderful way.

It was GOOD.

And Susan said to Pam, "Perhaps you should wish for something else today…"

Because sometimes, we wish for something, and we get it. Not always, but often enough. I need to notice when that happens.

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Just because a thing is unexpected, that doesn't make it a disaster.

The little bathroom downstairs was looking pretty dingy. Its paint was kind of a barn-red, which was dark for the tiny room, and the white of the door and woodwork was scraped and dented and dusty and yellow. The whole ambience was just depressing.

And the room is TINY. So I decided, one weekend not long ago, that I'd just scrub it down and paint it up in time for the holidays. I put on my grubby painting clothes and started prepping the room.

I took all the art down, and Mark helped me take down the cute little cabinets he'd made from desk drawers. I tossed the little basket we used for toothbrushes…its handle was frayed and sad, and: new paint job, right? Shouldn't we have a new toothbrush basket, too?

Then Mark unscrewed the ornate hook on which that basket had hung.

The hole left by the hook was kind of puckered. I took a scraper and picked at that. To my surprise, the wall surface peeled away in long, soggy strips. The wall underneath was sodden, and there was a strong, surprising smell of mildew.

I scraped more, and more wall peeled away, and my quick little painting idea burst like a lazy bubble and suddenly the little bathroom was a BIG JOB.

I bleached the soggy wall, and I did throw a coat or two of mold-resistant white paint on it, just so the bathroom wasn't a complete eyesore in the interim--in the time, that is, before the trusted professionals could get there to bail us out.

And I lamented, a LOT. My little job—now a big production! Woe! I said. Woe, oh woe.

So last week, the guys came in and took a good look, and they took down walls, and they realized that the bathroom upstairs was somehow leaking.

Then they took down the ceiling and discovered a big jagged hole in a significant pipe, and they fixed that, eliminating the water and the problem.

So the little bathroom is stripped down to bare bones, and soon it will get a total refresh—new vanity, new commode, even ship lap walls, which will be cottage-y and warm.

And I keep thinking about what could have happened if we hadn't discovered that leak—the damage that could have been caused, the monumental jobs we might have had to undertake.

So yes, the project I had planned was not the project that needed to be put into play. But that little detour saved us from a whole lot of hurt down the road.

Thank goodness that plans don't always go exactly as envisioned.

Sometimes it's nice to shake things up a little bit.

"Where should we put the tree this year?" Mark asked.

My first impulse was to say, "In the living room window, of course."

That's where the Christmas tree has been every year that we've lived here, but suddenly I thought, well, WHY?

Is that the ONLY place for the tree to be?

So we brainstormed, the three of us, and we decided to put the tree in the bay window in the family room this year.

We found a little tree, maybe three feet high, in the storage room downstairs (I'd forgotten we even had that little guy), and we put that on the dresser in the living room window, and its candy cane lights twinkle out, into the night, at our neighbors.

This weekend, we'll rearrange furniture in the family room, and put the big old tree up in a whole new spot. That will be kind of fun.

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Inspired, James and I decorated the mantle. We pulled all the Christmas books—Dickens and Tolkien and a murder mystery with a festive name and a tiny recounting of the nativity and some glossy children's tales---and displayed them above the fireplace, and then we got the Santas out and put half of them on the mantel, next to the books, and the rest on the shelf in the kitchen.

Today, I went down to the basement to find the Christmas plates and realized that—Oh, no!---we'd forgotten all about the Christmas piggies, which, you know, BELONG on the mantel.

The short end to this story is that the piggies are on the shelf (that is really a square wooden pipe from an old pipe organ) in the entry way. To get them there, I cleaned out the coats and shoes cluttering the space, and I hung up two Christmas plates on nails already in place.

Because of my forgetfulness, the piggies have a new place to chill, and they look GOOD, and the little entryway is much more festive and welcoming to folks coming in. (It almost makes one not notice the gutted powder room).

So…drum roll…Lesson, please, I say to the Universe, and It smacks me upside the head and says, Honey, you can figure this out.

And here's what I remind myself:

  • Traditions are not mandates.
  • Doing things a little differently from time to time can help me see and appreciate life in a whole new way.
  • It's fun to open the back door and see the little piggies hanging out on the shelf.

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One would think—one would THINK, right?---that I'd remember these lessons, having had so many opportunities to learn them. I believe that, if there are lessons we really need to learn, the Universe keeps giving us opportunities, until we absorb them.

Smart people get it on one try. I am offered many repeat lessons.

But this year I've written them down, haven't I? I can wish for this, then: that THIS year, maybe those lessons'll stick.

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