I’ve been a bit poorly of late but I’m on the mend now, (the not-terrible stage of recovery) so here’s another of my ‘things I have thunked’ posts …

First up, another entry into the Secret Lives Of Inanimate Objects … (that I briefly indulged in, in my previous post)

The tealeaf limped to the edge of the pot,
Done in by water too hot.
And bravely clung to the lip and looked out,
Across the tea-tray that cared not one jot.

For tea-trays thought themselves above all of that,
Concerned only for appearances sake.
The shape of the jug, the position of the spoon,
And the perfectly sliced piece of cake.

Undaunted, the tealeaf persisted,
In its quest for the meaning beyond.
And it wriggled and squiggled to the tea-tray below
And landed before that worthy could respond.

But our tealeaf never got any further,
Because the tray was emptied down the sink.
And down through the pipes the tealeaf was washed,
To the sewer below before it could blink.

Our adventurer was in big trouble now,
‘Cause all manner of monsters lurked down there.
Made up of the things humans flushed down their pipes,
All bound for who-knew-where.

The tealeaf scrunched itself into a ball,
That monsters could never find.
And thusly escaping their clutches,
Until it was long gone, out of sight and of mind.

(Well, this turned out rather more dramatic than I anticipated. It initially began as part of the internal dialogue my fevered mind kept me awake with during the above mentioned ‘poorly-ness’. For five very long hours one night it was running through showtunes from just about every musical I’ve ever seen – The Sound of Music, (of course – Julie Andrews being my first girl-crush) Brigadoon, Calamity Jane, (Doris Day being a close second) Chicago, Cabaret, Oklahoma, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, (I mean, what’s a good sing-a-long if it doesn’t include at least one song) Phantom Of The Opera, Mary Poppins, (Julie, again) The Rose (classic Bette Midler) just to name a few, and in amongst all that, somehow, the story of the tealeaf was born … anyway, back to the story …)

Long days passed, and alone in the dark,
The tealeaf sang every song that it knew.
To distract itself from grief and regret,
And hoping its spirit to renew.

But tealeaves don’t live forever,
No matter how hard they pine.
By the time it reached the end of the pipe,
It had reached the edge of the line.

As the sun set over the ocean blue,
The tealeaf looked out on a vista so vast.
Its adventure had ended, as adventures do,
And it decomposed, at peace, at last.

But that isn’t the end of its story,
For in its breast it had nurtured a seed.
That sprouted and grew with green leaves unfurled
Until someone called it a weed.

Just as this new life was about to be uprooted,
By someone who a gardener, was not.
A screech and a caterwaul stayed their hand just in time,
And the seedling planted tenderly in a pot.

It now sits in a sunny corner
Of a Garden, on a shelf, with a view
Awaiting its uncertain future
Which will probably conclude in a brew.

-oOo-

My first visit to an orthopedic surgeon, (a bloke with the unfortunate name of ‘Butcher’) will be at the end of this month, April! … call me gobsmacked! I wasn’t expecting anything to happen for at least another six months.

This visit’s just a ‘getting to know you’ sort of thing … he’ll peer at my x-rays and poke/prod/bend my knees in all sorts of ways they will certainly not approve of … I’ll concentrate very hard on not tensing up as my pain threshold is trampled over … and we’ll discuss the next steps forward.

-oOo-

A little something from Mother Nature to remind me that although the snow has now melted down to only about a meter deep, and it rained wet watery stuff the other day, we’re still only reaching daytime temperatures of around 5°C …

A snowstorm …