garbage and / or gratitude

Thanks to having spent ten relatively happy minutes laughing at what the newspapers have to say about Andrew Broad, I'm feeling a lot better than I was a few hours ago.  It tells you something, doesn't it,* that what moves me to make time to write about my life, what pushes me to do it, what makes me prepared to accept the sacrifice of two hours or more of sleep, is feeling bad, feeling so crappy that I cried while I washed the dishes and thought in ever-decreasing circles around my sad and damaged life.

It was finding a mess in the fridge that did it. A half a can of sliced peaches had been decanted into a plastic takeaway container, then pushed to the back of the fridge and knocked up onto the short end, so the liquid leaked out and dripped all over and down the back of the shelf and into the two drawers beneath. So I cried intermittently as I washed and dried the vegetables and jars and drawers and shelves, and threw away everything old and cleaned the mess of everything still edible. And though I am very tired, I went on to clean other things as well. In certain phases of my cycle my sense of smell becomes very acute, especially for bad odours, and some of the things I could smell in the house were making me very unhappy. I washed and dried the dishes, swept the floor, scrubbed the kitchen benches, brought in a load of dry washing and washed and hung out the next one, put away some of the clutter, changed the sheets on my bed, cleaned the toilet and basin, picked up rubbish from the back yard and put it in the bin, then put the bin on the kerb.

Clean sheets usually fix most things, but they're not cheering me up much this evening. I've sprinkled some lavender oil onto my pillow, but I still have the lingering sense memory of one almost unbelievably bad smell.

It's been raining very hard in Melbourne.

*it tells me something, actually, not you, since the blog is still locked down and it's only me that can read this.