Up there at the top of the page it say, “Life is funny. Not funny, but funny.”
It doesn’t say that because I think life is nothing but a barrel of laughs. Far from it. But I do think that the hard things in life, the annoying things, the frustrating things, the frightening things, are easy to see.
But in the midst of all the other mess, there is this sprinkling of funny. Like someone spilled some funny-glitter 8,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and, being glitter, it has stuck to everything and spread, completely covering the globe. There is literally funny-glitter everywhere.
I do think it is an art form, finding the funny-glitter, because it isn’t always obvious.
It’s in odd places and it only sparkles when the light hits it right, so you really have to be on the lookout to find it. And that’s what this blog is. It’s my way of looking for the glitter laying around in my day.
This week’s glitter was found in a snow pile.
Or two.
Funny-Glitter 1:
When the plow comes down our street it sprays a rainbow of soft snowy powder off the road, but this snow does NOT form into a drift. The reason for this is that in rural areas every single inch of street is bordered by a ditch. Some of them quite deep. So the plow rainbows the snow over and fills the ditch, often up to the height of the road. Leaving it to look like there’s just a flat, snowy shoulder next to the road.
Appearances are deceiving, though, aren’t they?
For instance, the road will hold up a car.
The ditch, now filled to the same height with fluffy white snow, will not.
In fact, it will not hold up a car so much that it will require a tow truck to remove the car from the ditch.
If I had been reminded of this truth first hand, the glitter would have been hard to spot. Thankfully this was not the case.
My parents came to visit and you may (or may not) want to ask my father if he discovered this truth.
Twice.
In a row.
Funny-Glitter 2:
I got to cross an animal off my Wild-Animals-I-Want-To-See Bucket List this week. The one that might be the hardest to actually see, even though there are apparently a lot of them that live near me.
It’s probably the most intimidating one, and there are a good number of intimidating animals around here.
One intimidating animal I have seen before is a bald eagle. You may not think bald eagles are intimidating, but they are. Because every time I see one it’s sitting high on branch, looking down its beak at me. I know it’s just a bird, but I can’t escape the feeling that it’s judging my patriotism. And finding me lacking.
credit: 7 Themes
Black bears are also intimidating. We’ve seen a number of them and unlike when you see them in a zoo, when they’re just up the hill you can’t ignore how powerful those animals are compared to scrawny little humans.
But this week, this week, I saw the king of the mountains beasts. The one that’s always sneaking around at night eating people’s pets, but rarely actually seen.
I was driving up the road only about a half mile from our home when a mountain lion crossed the road in front of me.
Mountain lion!
He looked like this:
credit: tumblr
That’s a lie.
He actually looked like this:
credit: Glacier National Park
Because he didn’t make eye contact with me at all. Why? I think he was embarrassed.
You see, as he leapt onto the road, in all of his brawny menacing-ness, he stepped onto that place next to the road where the plowed snow was covering a ditch.
And his big mountain lion paw sank in deep and fast, making him stumble and almost face plant onto the side of the road.
He scrambled back into a suitably intimidating posture before running across the road, doing his best to act tough. (Which, honestly, sort of worked. Because mountain lion.)
Then he disappeared like a ghost into the woods.
He was huge and scary and beautiful. And I’m very, very glad I was inside my car. And that he tripped so that he was more concerned with his own bruised pride than with eating me.
I just hope that if one is ever chasing me, I can use my knowledge of the soft-snow-in-the-ditch to my advantage in trying to get away.
Did you find any glitter stuck to anything your life this last week? If so, let me know what it was. If not, may you find some this coming week.
