Point of View: Sorry, Discontinued

Mary said they’d discontinued her makeup, and I said the things we liked seemed always to be discontinued, like the fleecy warm-up pants I just had had sewn, and which I’ll wear every day now until the end of eternity.

And, yes, not to sound too morose a note, our lives will be discontinued as well, and to prepare I’ve begun hauling my regrets to the dump to be deposited in the far corner with corrosive things unfit for recycling. 

Montaigne said that if you’d lived a while by the time death came you were pretty much dead anyway, so there really wasn’t much to it. Meanwhile he continued planting his cabbages, as I do too in a way if you consider what a wonderful compost heap could be made of my outpourings. 

Speaking of compost, we had to get rid of ours — just as was the case with my regrets — because rats, we thought, were delighting in it, as they evidently also were with the birdseed on the ground. I caught onetwothreejustlikethat in a Havahart trap, and felt very proud of myself, much as O’en does when he’s strutting ahead of me with a stick between his teeth.

Discontinuing the bird feeding has deprived us of colorful and compelling company, though I guess it had to be done, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, divested of regrets for the time being, I can, perhaps like the rats in the compost, spend more time delighting in transitory things, in the woodsmoke scent of Mary’s hair, in her warmth and laughter, and in the golden light at the end of summer days, in the memory of the proud tilt of a little wren’s head, and in O’en’s black eyes.

For, in the end, that’s it! That’s all there is, folks.