It's true.
I didn't say it. But I thought it. My children are always teasing me when things like this come out of my mouth. Where do they come from?
Well, as I was walking in the door tonight, after a long night's work on a cardiac unit, I was thinking about the trees. The moon shone through the tall hemlock in the back yard that my great grandfather planted there for my great grandmother. The walnut trees have such an allure in the winter moonlight, leaving shadows in the snow. Those same black walnut trees are worth about $2000 apiece, and I was thinking, you can't buy a new walnut tree like that for $2000. Once it is gone, it is gone. If we sell them for timber, we will have money, but no walnut trees, ever again. You can grow more, but I would be 80, or dead before they'd be like that again. Is it worth $2000? I kind of like the trees the way they are. I'd miss them. I'd miss them almost as much as I'd miss a person if they died, and life is supposed to be priceless. Are the walnut trees that priceless?
Anyways, the newspaper on the top of a stack of newspapers on the back porch had a headline on it that caught my eye as I walked in the door. It was about Iraq. It said another attack had happened. Who knows what day or year that newspaper was. It could have been any in the last 3 or 4.
And...on the kitchen table was a new package of seeds that had come in the mail. It was cucumber seeds I had ordered. And the words just went through my head - just like that:
"You can't buy a cucumber attack for $2000."
What does it mean when your mind jumbles a small chain of events like that. About 8 or 9 years ago, I would have joked that I was getting Alzheimers, but it is such an old joke that most seasoned nurses cringe when someone says it. (My ex-husband likes that sort of cringe). Or it would worry me, because once on the series, "Murder She Wrote," Angela Lansbury solves a mystery where a woman leaves out letters in her words that she writes, because the woman has a brain tumor. (My ex-husband used to tease me maliciously when I said something stupid, that it was my brain tumor talking). I leave out letters in words I write all the time - especially the first letter. Should I get a CT scan of the brain?
You know, we have the weirdest dreams. But after reading Freud's biography by Irving Stone, and writing down and thinking through some of my own dreams, I think our brains put things like this together for reasons. It is a puzzle, and if we figure it out, it gives us insight into our subconscious thinking.
Maybe it means that I can't really make money off of this farm. Or maybe it means that ...planting cucumbers is not going to help me save $2000 on my grocery bills. I'll have to think about it a little longer. Maybe I'll ponder it as I drink my Mother's Milk tea, and cuddle my 7 month old baby, and drift blissfully off to sleep, feeling the ache in my legs from walking up 6 flights of stairs at work instead of taking the elevators to the 7th floor, in effort to get back into shape and lose weight. The bed feels so nice when your muscles are sore. Your husband and baby feel so warm when it is snowy and cold outside, and the moon makes shadows under the giant black walnut trees.
