Solstice, schmoltice
So, I’m in the powder room washing my hands and the towel bar falls off the wall and crashes to the floor. It just unhitched itself from the plaster. I wasn’t touching it and, really, how heavy can a small Santa Claus hand towel be?
There’s a pattern developing here.
In the past several days, things in my life and in the life of my friends have gone haywire.
Thanks to Facebook, I’m learning about these things, which otherwise would go lamented but unreported.
My friend’s furnace croaked yesterday. After she mentioned this on Facebook (in a humorous way, but still), the other reports came flooding in: broken faucets, leaky things, faulty lights, a washer that won’t wash.
Also yesterday, the scraping sound on my daughter’s car turned out to be a costly and time-consuming brake job.
Oh, and did I mention we all have our annual pre-Christmas head colds?
What should we blame for this gathering storm of trouble? I don’t think it’s coincidence that this happened at the winter solstice, the day on which our part of the world is farther from the sun than on any other day.
They say that in order to stay happy and well, we need to feel the sun on our faces every day, and that hasn’t happened for any of us lately. The furnace, giver of heat, went cold at the precise time the sun spun away from us, thank you very much.
It’s notable that the reports of broken things have not been presented as real trouble – just costly pains in the neck. My friends realize that a faulty furnace or a fallen towel rack are first-world problems. One need only look around to know that no matter what, things can be so much worse. And for many people, here and everywhere else in the world, they are.
Still, there’s an adage that goes like this: Just because you have a broken arm doesn’t mean my hangnail doesn’t hurt. We live in our own misery, but everything gets a little better when we keep perspective.
And so as I sit here breathing through my mouth and going through a million Kleenex, I alternate between feeling sorry for myself and being grateful the house is toasty warm.
The farmer has a to-do list: first the car brakes and then the towel rack. I’m grateful he can fix anything, and is willing to.
The Santa Claus hand towel may not be back on the rack by Christmas, but that’s OK.
After all, there’s still clean water coming out of the faucet.
We can dry our hands on our shirts, and get on with it.
We have a roof over our heads.
The kids are OK.
As the T-shirt says, “Life is Good.”
And as the famous line goes, God bless us, every one.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.