Friday morning I finally threw out an angel with the kitchen trash, the head having been knocked off years ago by my dearly departed husband during his morning rush to get to work on time. He secretly glued the angel's head back on and tied a red ribbon to conceal the crack then never told me. He had broken other angels and knew how much this bothered me for whatever reason. The red satin sagged and faded, then perhaps months after last Christmas I threw the ribbon away, not knowing I'd find a hairline crack visibly glued.
We have an impressive collection of glue but no Elmer's white glue which is what I wanted for a project I'm making. Could swear there was a lifetime supply of half used bottles with those orange tips that never worked right from yearly back-to-school purchases but there wasn't any Elmer's to be found. Considered a step up from the kindergarten paste many children liked to eat, but with having so many teachers in my family, we were warned about the dangers of that behavior, same for Play-Doh with that irresistible aroma.
Between the sharp contrast of smelly garbage and the sweet scent memory of Play-Doh competing, I was having second thoughts about the sad angel perched on the bookshelf with hands clasped, chubby ankles crossed, head down, wings furled but pleasingly asymmetrical, which is when I carefully blew some dust off. The absence of dust revealed the top of one wing also had been glued and for no reason my thoughts turned to burying the angel instead. In fact, there is actually a historical precedent for burial on this acre.
A great many things have been laid to rest in this backyard. Long before I lived here, garbage was buried or burned. In the last thirty years, we've contributed dead pets, mummified G.I. Joe action figures, fighting green plastic army men, marbles, my old clay sculptures and a few dead birds. I imagined future owners with archaeologically interested offspring or other gardeners finding amongst the mint, lemon balm and tansy gone rampant, a lone lost angel with cracks that he probably used some glue guaranteed to last forever.
Currently, I needed to temporarily fix a window box where tiny grease ants were getting in from outside, traipsing across my counter top past the butter dish and toaster, then up and down and all around the olive oil decanter, heading towards the cutting board on the way to the coffee maker. These ants were so small I had to hunt for my reading glasses to make certain I wasn't hallucinating. Reading glasses confirmed I was not imagining ants as the scouting party of one or three quickly became quite the determined small safari.
Not the best homemaker by far, I do keep my cooking area tidy so I was more than mildly annoyed, consulting the source of all information where I was reminded that if straight vinegar doesn't confuse ants by disrupting their scent trails, bottle caps filled with half sugar and half borax will attract them then wipe the entire colony out. This concept deeply bothers me and I have my reasons, the exception being carpenter ants. Borax and sugar were the way my environmentally aware husband dealt with their presence.
My husband made this mixture for as long as I can recall so I was pretty sure there would still be a box of borax down in his dank dungeon of model railroads, old and new tools plus miscellaneous ephemera dating back decades. Periodically, I descend into that realm either hoping to find something that might be there or to throw out strange things he saved, his reasons written on labels of jars, on boxes or attached to varied items. Sometimes this saddens me, sometimes I laugh at the precise labels or misspelled words.
The distinctive pale green box with young cowboy and whip sat silently behind a helium tank from his magic show balloon antics, six saltwater aquariums filled with old coral and a Van de Graaff generator, also from his magic show. Wearing an OSHA and NIOSH N95 respirator as well as highly fashionable safety goggles, I reached for the box. The goggles started steaming up although I could still see through the foggy mist of my breath that the borax had solidified because one side of the box had slightly split open.
Something slid and fell to my right but I was already committed to carefully getting the borax into a plastic bag, impressed at the solid white miniature monolith soon to be combined with sugar as ant killing potion. Mission accomplished, I glanced down to the floor where a neon green flashlight designed to clip on a key chain boldly proclaimed Jesus is the Light and the Way! something I highly doubt was my husband's nor had I ever seen it before. There was also an unopened package of glow-in-the-dark stars. Bonus!
Shoving the two odd things in my pockets, I trudged back upstairs with the borax, having gotten quite sidetracked from making coffee and planning to kill the unsuspecting ants who by now were going in strange loops wherever I had left swipes of vinegar. Feeling more than a bit cruel, I questioned my now evil seeming thoughts of burying the forlorn angel who was back up on the bookshelf above the Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1972, Volumes 13 and 14, topics in gold letters from Jirasek and Lighthouses to Light and Maximillian.
Three hours had disappeared but now I knew several new things. There are things that happen and there is no reason for it, one thing leads to another, life snowballs, time passes, weird things occur and that is just the way the world is, for better or worse. I choose better because although I need not explain my reasons, I was on the highway being driven to another new doctor. Someone had written on a dusty truck Be Nice 2Day. I agreed in heart, mind and spirit, putting away my non-toxic poison and broken angel for another Friday.