The Ruination of my Temple, my Mosque, my Cathedral


Did you ever feel a tad depressed and for no good reason?

I hate it when this happens.

I am mostly the eternal optimist; Little Mary Sunshine. I can see the good in a bad situation. I don’t ruminate over the negative but look for ways to make things positive. I see the glass half full. I roll up my sleeves and attack the bad or sad and fill the void with all the beauty and wonderfulness that life can offer.

Sure. Sounds good – but sometimes it just doesn’t work and I feel this thing in my stomach that resembles a wad of bread dough, heavy and protean; a weight that brings the corners of my mouth southward and takes along my eyebrows for good measure.

It started Sunday and I’m just pulling myself out of it. There is no specific event or disappointment that I can point to as the cause. It just enveloped me and licked the flap closed.

None of my usual tricks, platitudes or inspirational phrases slit the envelope open. I tried: Things could be worse; For every low there’s a high coming around the bend; Let me count my blessings; What do I have to complain about; It takes rain and sun to make a rainbow.

Nothing helped.

But I did make it worse. I watched a movie called 21 Grams which if you are even slightly depressed will take that emotion and run with it until you are ready to do yourself in on the spot if the movie won’t end.

I would recommend this movie to people who are so damned happy it is ruining their lives and they need to tamp down their level of euphoria for health reasons, but to no one else.

Note to myself: Never watch a movie where a child or an animal is abused, hurt, or killed.

Funny, now that I'm writing about this I have figured out what the probable reason is that I felt/feel this low-level despair. Figuring out what is wrong is probably the best thing you can do when suffering from a case of the non-specific blues.

Yup - this is it.

The neighbors in the back are tearing down all the vines, greenery, dead tree limbs and brush from our connecting border, leaving it all neat and clean and wide open between the two yards.

Normally this would be an opportunity to rejoice in the new neighbors’ desire to manicure that yard which has been less than orderly since I moved here. But for me it’s a loss of privacy and I worry about my birds' habitat and how this clean-up will effect their lives.

We have a very shallow back yard with a deep front yard. This was never a problem when we had that maze of vegetation that acted as both a visual and audio barrier. When I looked out my back windows I could feel as if I lived in uncharted territory…you could barely see a light shine through the green growth in the summer and I could imagine my property went on for miles.

Now I’m drinking my coffee and looking at my bird feeder and a man is standing in my view so close I can see he nicked himself shaving. Instead of the ptwooey ptwooey of my male cardinal, I hear the neighbor's wife: Who’s going to pick up this brush? You missed some of the vines. How many trees are we chopping down?

I also hear the droning buzz of Mr. New Neighbor’s brand-new chain saw. (I can tell it’s brand new because I can see the price sticker on it!)

My green cathedral is being chopped down and now, along with my birds, I can study the habits and lives of my new neighbors.

On the positive side though, I do know what's bothering me.

Little Mary Sunshine to the rescue once again.