I am a Mountain Girl,
But I am NOT a farm girl!
I used to pretend like I could be, but it was exhausting, so now I am content to not be!
Here’s why
I feel for EVERYTHING! No guys, you don’t understand, I mean, EVERYTHING! Spiders? Catch them and take them outside. Flies? Let them buzz around until they die. Bees? Shoo them out a door.
One year we had a horrible grasshopper problem in our garden. We called it the Plague of Locusts! It was so bad, they were eating everything. Someone told me they filled pickle jars with grasshoppers to get the pests out of their yard and threw the jars in the trash. I tried that y’all, and I felt so sorry for the suffocating grasshoppers that I couldn’t throw the jar away, I just let them go, back in the yard.
Our garden stunk that year.
We have cats. Killer cats. Killer cats of death!
Sometimes I wish I could program them to leave the birds and the bunnies, just kill the gophers and don’t do it where I can see it!
If anyone figures out how to do that, please let me know.
Frequently, I’ve rescued baby bunnies from their clutches, before the bunny was too far gone to escape with it’s life. But the other day, I heard a sound like a baby crying in my garage.
My baby is in middle school.
So, yeah, I thought I was losing it.
Then I remembered. When bunnies are dying, they scream, and it sounds exactly like an infant.
I only wish I were joking.
I grabbed the broom and headed to the garage to rescue the poor thing, but I was too late. It was, literally, mortally wounded.
Did I cry?
Buckets.
Buckets of ugly crying tears.
I told you! I am NOT a farm girl!
Also, I took a deep breath, closed the garage door and let the cats finish the job. It was the right thing to do. As I walked away, I kept repeating to myself, let the cats be cats. Just let the cats be cats. It’s better this way.
Why the heck am I telling you this!?
Because I realized something. How often do we try to change the way something is? A person, a thing, a circumstance, an event, a prognosis, a choice?
Have you noticed, most of the time, we can’t. We really can’t change it. It is what it is.
Learning to accept what is, I think, is one of the most challenging things we do in this life. But just like anything, the more we try, the better we will get at it and eventually, we will be so much happier if we learn to accept the things we really can’t change.
Even if it really stinks!
And, you know, we can have peace with it, by choosing how we think about it. Cause the truth is, we always get to choose how we think about things. It’s not good or bad until we think it is.
Nothing is a fact until we decide it is.
So, take a deep breath with me friends, and let’s practice letting the cats be cats.
whew!