Accept It?

We all gripe but maybe there’s a way to not mind this endless winter and it is this: Accept it.Look at it this way: Sure there’s always that salt-and-sand mix on the floor by the door, agreed. You track it in on your boots and shoes and every day there’s more of it. Always with the salt and sand by the door!  But what are you gonna do? Sure, you can sweep it up every day and sure, you can put down a mat for those boots and shoes, but mostly things are gonna look a little litter-boxy for a while yet over there by the door. Accept that fact. Accept the fact that there’s still treacherous walking caused by the snow and the ice and the slush and the more snow. Over the last few weeks I have seen so many people take that banana-peel-style leap-and-tumble I feel like I’m watching some kind of super-athletic dance company in action. The other day at the grocery store I saw five people on crutches with casts on their legs. Five! And all of them were under 40!Sometimes it just feels safer to just stay indoors, so accept that fact.Maybe even try being glad for it. Because when you’re spending more time indoors you have the chance to tidy up a bit.Take the job of cleaning your closets. People don’t clean their closets in summer. It’s now that we’re moved to do it.  I’ve been cleaning closets myself lately. I’ve also been customizing things. Yesterday I dyed a bunch of sad old towels with hilarious results. (Let’s just say it looks like my man will be wearing underpants of a gorgeous sunrise hue for a while.)And today I began going over letters sent to me by people who have been reading my column all these years. I laughed all over again at the one where a woman wrote, in reference to the picture that accompanied my column at that time, “What makes you think you’re so great? Your eyes are beady, your hair is out of style, and your teeth look false.”After the initial shock, I laughed when I first saw it too. And when I published my first collection of short funny pieces I put that quote right on the back cover where the gushing remarks usually go. I took at lightly in other words. I took it with a grain of salt.Maybe that’s what we all have to do right now. Maybe we have take these snow banks with a grain of salt - and God knows the salt is in good supply. We can just amble over to that spot where our boots and shoes are and take some from there.As I say, what're you gonna do?

the above-mentioned blurb , I Thought He Was a Speed Bump