GETTING LABOR DAY RIGHT                                        JUNE 16, 2014

This piece was written just after Labor Day, but somehow my body was “off,” and not working as the fine-tuned unit it used to be, so it was not allowing me to type it up to get on Tammy’s website. The fingers rebelled and refused to type. They don’t type very good anymore anyway. So please read it now — a few weeks late.

This is about the Aztec Princess, more widely known as the Warden. You know what? I think she was a little confused and under the impression that Labor Day was just that — a LABOR day.

When I finally got out of bed for the day — not very early — I headed for the kitchen to get a jump start with a cup of coffee. I noticed the Warden was ‘round and about busily doing things, but I was more zeroed in on my coffee, and since I hadn’t put my “ears” in yet, I wouldn’t be able to hear her talking to me. So it was just as well, and then there wouldn’t be the yelling back and forth. A little later I asked her what she had been doing since the crack of dawn — she gets up EARLY! She mentioned “Oh, cleaning around here and there, throwing out stuff that has stayed too long, and rearranging stuff; and just busy d-o-i-n-g things, straightening up things.” Yes, she had been laboring away. It was quite noticeable that the kitchen had been visited by Mrs. Clean. It was sparkling.

All this seemed a bit weird to me because the cleaning ladies were scheduled for Friday, and we just leave everything to them for weeks, or even months. She was STILL bustling about after she stopped long enough to zap my bowl of lentils filled with goodies and about 5 or 6 Kalamata olives. M-m-m-m-m-m, g-o-o-o-d.   My breakfast.

She disappeared while I was savoring my breakfast, and had gone off to raise mayhem in the garage. I checked on her, and she was busy, busy, busy with a golf bag, so I left her to her own devices and returned to my little corner of the world to see what the laptop could tell me.

Now here is the kicker to this Labor Day tale: That golf bag the Warden had been toiling over, polishing, scrubbing, etc. was MY golf bag, and she was cleaning it all up because she was going to commandeer it using the law of eminent domain, maybe. Well, my bag has been sitting there with everything (my clubs, balls, towels, etc.) as it was on the day I gave up my favorite game because the rotor cuffs in my shoulders had given up working ——– just like my hands are giving up typing. Her bag was looking a little worse for the wear.

I am still appalled to think she was working her buns off all day on this LABOR DAY while everyone else is out carousing around, or having a picnic, and the banks and post offices are closed.

She had probably lost track of what day it was. I am always on the wrong day, and it must be catching.

MELITAS FORSTER                                 MONDAYS WITH MELITAS