Located down the main drag, past the pet shop, the art gallery, the restaurants, is the village hardware store. Went down to peruse the shelves for mouse deterrents. Stood there for some time, staring at the various choices I have for killing the things, and as I feared, no options in my price range for deterring. Much as I expected.

Well, I may have to take D3 up on his offer of the traps, as another popped out this morn as I was writing this post. The last sentence originally was exceptional in its naiveté, and as such said something completely different.

Anywho, it was whilst strolling down the way that I passed the old bakery shop, which seems to have closed its doors, which is a shame. Tucked in around the back, even now you have to actually know it’s there to even see it, well there is a tiny little apartment that I viewed way-way back in my Helium Sphere days, after the final collapse of the ground underneath what had become a lie, after my marriage died.

At the time I was hunting for something that I see now really didn’t exist. I don’t remember what was wrong with that little apartment, heck, I don’t recall the interior at all, but as I walk by today I do wonder if I was maybe too harsh? It seems as though it would be rather charming to live tucked in behind a bakery shop, just there on the main street. I can’t recall, for the life of me, not a peep of memory about why I turned it down when the appearance from this vantage point offers me a much different perspective.

I was walking away from a house, going to a tiny space with hardly anything outside to be called a garden, or so I remember thinking at the time.

But, as I walk by, almost 20 years to a day, and realize how much I’ve changed. I don’t even really know that person I was back then, back in the winter of 1999 when I was on the brink of a journey that I’m just now appreciating. Back then I was just scared, I was unsure, I was not ready yet to be something else.

Not long before, well ok, a couple of years before, I was in complete and utter denial as to the health of this relationship that I had pinned so many hopes and dreams to, as we are supposed to. I mean, isn’t that what marriage is? A place to pin your hopes and dreams? Those pie in the sky aspirations were dashed like dominoes, with truths that I had not seen coming, falling one by one. My husband had been the last of his siblings, born into an abusive childhood whose effects I had really never completely understood.

Never grasped the significance, the pain, the aching dark corners of his tortured beginnings. How these things can damage parts of yourself that act out, over neglect and time, in strange and perverse ways throughout one’s life.

Walking past that never-to-be apartment, I found myself whisked back to those difficult days so suddenly that I almost tripped over nothing on the sidewalk, as if the memories came to life upon the hardened wintry ground before me, waiting to be re-examined. I’ve walked past it before, and thought the same thoughts, but maybe it was my mouse in a trap mindset, but it became more real this time.

Oh, I walked away from so many things back then. All these entangled dreams and goals that my naiveté had believed to be impossible. For some reason I turned away from the uncommon ground I was headed towards, rushing back to those things I thought I knew and understood. Yet, over time I have come to understand that I was brainwashed by the pessimistic mind of a boy who had been made to believe the world was an ugly selfish place. I believed the lies he’d been told, at the expensive of the why not of my Grandmother and Mom, of those who had turned me towards that creative path they knew in their marrow I craved.

My tripping point has always been that I am a sucker for the wounded, and at times I’ve wondered if I wear some homing device that attracts them.

My empathy and compassion have been abused, and such have sometimes been both a blessing and a curse. Certainly, Tim used them to his advantage, as have others. Though few since, and not for long. No, I am no longer so naïve as to give myself away for just the opportunity to soothe a broken wing, or soul, with nothing in return but an empty wallet, and worse, heart.

Which was exactly my thinking when the other morning I let the dog out and discovered one of my heavy planters knocked over in the middle of the concrete. Yeah, so this thing isn’t going to just knock itself over, and being that it had been tucked away in the alcove outside my door, it is exceptionally doubtful that a gigantic burst of wind just happened to blow in from big wind land and knock the thing over. No, this has the fingerprints of a drunk at my door sometime in the night. Someone who had I guess retained some of their wits about them and figured after busting up my decor at my door I may not be so happy to see their face.

Anywho, wise choice.

Em. How does one build a better mousetrap? One that catches the thing, like some Amazon delivery drone, and flies it out to the country to live out its meagre existence in a meadow the other side of the buck-fook-nowhere land?

Oh, but, let me tell ya, it is wonderful to have such little problems. After the gigantic feelings of those years, back when that little place down behind the bakery seemed so inadequate, such a step-down, when in fact I see now it would have been a leap, and those sort of things have been taken cautiously.

But should they? I wonder now where I would have been if I’d chosen that little place. In my mind’s eye, I can see my little garden, with a tall stand of grass blocking the view, a row of wildflowers against the whitewashed wall, or perhaps a line of lavender, with a little bistro table & chair, and perhaps an Asparagus Fern hanging from a black wrought iron shepherds hook.

I guess that is me now, though. The ‘me’ with what I learned from the lake garden of that grey county I tended and grew and my learning came ultimately from those that had tended it before me, Tim’s Mom and Dad. I looked at their choices, and added my own, with little sprays of wild things at the fringe of the graceful Hosta’s and the grand Ferns, layered in with the dark green form offered by the Cedars and the Yew. Bits and bobs from the fellow gardening neighbours, who welcomed me into their fold, acknowledging my wish to add my personality to their little nook of heaven on earth.

So we have had a couple of days of sun in a row that is going away this week when winter is supposed to make its return. The sun was a wonderful respite from the dreary days ahead, as February can be the cruellest month, with days of sun and a wisp of spring in the air, followed by a plunge overnight and knee-deep snow by noon, and do everything under a thick blanket of frigidity. I am not looking forward.

So, whilst on the john these dreary days I leaf through the Richter’s Herb Catalogue, and dream of spring. Going through and visiting my dreams I intend to make real. Not pinned to anyone. These are not hopes, they are now realities I have before me.

And so those memories, I see now, no longer trap me in their barbs, nor force me to turn away. Though I have to say, killing mice does. I really do have a hard time with it, but honestly, what choice have I? Until someone builds a better mousetrap.

/ for the dp STIFLE \
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