The detritus of life is everywhere—physical, emotional, spiritual. A little piece of wool sitting on my bathroom counter this morning sent me down that rabbit hole.
Meet Gack the Hairball
A couple of months ago, I created Gack, the hairball. (I’ve been making little crochet critters for a while–like Blossom) I made him partly because I wanted to try hand-knitting (ie with my hands and without needles) a ball. Also, I had this idea of making a hairball because I’m always finding bits of yarn and wool around my apartment. It seems like I find them even when I’m not working on anything, but maybe that’s not true—and I’ve usually got something on my wheel, hook, needles or fingers.
I found this YouTube video with instructions for a beautiful round pillow and made it my own (after watching several times–and it took more like half an hour)!
Today, as I saw this little bit of wool on my bathroom counter and wondered how on earth it got there, I also started wondering about the detritus of life that we don’t see.
Wash your hair with mud
Today, for the first time in a long time, the temperature rose into the 60’s today. Most of the ice has now melted from the play yard, and a few luscious muddy puddles remained. I looked out the window just before snack time and saw 4 little girls washing their hair with muddy water and the bar soap they had been carving. They looked very happy! Somehow in my mind this tied in with the fuzz and fluff in my apartment, even though their hair was more wet and plastered to their heads than light and airy.
I felt like Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoons, trailing a cloud of dust (or is it a cloud of glory?) wherever I go. And so I wrote this poem:
The detritus of life–a poem
What pieces of myself have I dropped by the wayside
Bits of fluff or scraps of soap,
Hard pebbles or perhaps the occasional boulder.
Traces of laughter, echoes of anger
Dust bunnies of silliness
puddles of thought, deep or shallow
clear or murky.
Will a child pick them up and put them in
Their pocket with their own detritus
And save them as treasures
Will they get thrown in the washing machine
Or fall under the car seat or between the
Cushions of a sofa to be vacuumed away at
Some unspecified date?
If I come across them again
Will I even remember what they are
Or why they sit upon my bathroom counter
Or if they even belong to me?
Poetry Friday
Rebecca Herzog at Sloth Reads hosts Poetry Friday today. Check out her post on last month’s daily poem project–with a water theme and some fun poems. Add your link, if you want.
And as always, thanks for stopping by!
xoxo
I am impressed by the parents who are willing to let their kids play in the mud puddles and deal with letting them come inside afterward!
“Gack” is a great hairball name and “dust bunnies of silliness” is a fun phrase/image!
Well, they were at school–and while we do let the children play in the mud, they don’t usually put it in their hair! But the parents seemed fine when I told them what happened. And you should have seen the happy faces of the children–definitely worth it!
Thanks–Gack reminds me of the sound my cats used to make when they coughed up hairballs–a happy memory????