Any week, I could begin to tell you how I’m doing by saying I’ve been striving, and each week it would be no less true than the one before.

Today, many times, my eighteen year old son flew past the house on his motorized scooter wearing slides and no helmet, doing wheelies in the rain. I debated internally whether to call out to him to put a helmet on, and maybe proper shoes. He is of age, and he knows how I feel about safety.

I didn’t say anything. But I did answer immediately when he called me this afternoon, wanting to see his face and make sure it wasn’t broken.

I spent two hours making salad from our farm share last night, then spent all day today eating other things and feeling guilty that I wasn’t eating the salad I’d made. Each opportunity to eat again was another lost chance to eat salad, as I grabbed a peach, a bowl of mac, a handful of chocolate coconut almonds.

I let my six year old play with a beach ball in the house today because I’m tired of telling him not to. I let him turn the TV back on even though he’d already watched a movie.

I looked online at other people’s sewing projects rather than working on my own. I felt guilty about that, too. It isn’t that I didn’t do any sewing work. I finished a pair of pants. I traced a favorite tank top so that another day I can make more like it. I thought about adding buttons and buttonholes to a jerkin for my daughter who thinks everyone is out to get her. My delay on the jerkin is proof to her of her life philosophy.

Finally, I slowed to a stop in my room with the windows open. I took off the socks that were a reminder of my dirty floors, my fault. Not my fault for dirtying them, my fault for not cleaning them, since I’m usually the only one living here who cares to do the kind of clean that would stop one’s socks from getting dirty.

I finished a book. Then, I picked up Felicity, by Mary Oliver. I knew after the first poem that she got me.

I guess I should have known she would, because of the reaction among the librarians when I asked for books of her work. The librarians were unanimously atwitter like a flock of songbirds about Mary Oliver.

She says:

Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About

The cricket doesn’t wonder

if there’s a heaven

or, if there is, if there’s room for him.

It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.

If he can, he enters a house.

through the tiniest crack under the door.

Then the house grows colder.

He sings slower and slower.

Then, nothing.

This must mean something, I don’t know what.

But certainly it doesn’t mean

he hasn’t been an excellent cricket

all his life.

I spend a lot of time wondering what it all means, and this was a good reminder that the way things are isn’t a reflection of our worth.