By Johanna Mohringer
Monday had not been a bad day for me till evening started and things turned sour.
I had hoped to finish a pair of sleeves I was knitting; however, I was short of desired yarn. I had thought I had an extra skein somewhere, but no, that was not the case. The first sleeve had been finished and I was short of yarn to finish its mate. Searching for yarn took some time and it was already getting dark.
At that point I started another pair with different colors and ran into the same problem, which was frustrating. All of my knitting needles were then tied up in this project.
In the morning I had received a letter from a close friend. She does not have a computer, so I was going to write her on my computer, then print it and send it per regular, old fashioned mail. I had the first page finished when the whole thing disappeared, leaving on my screen only an apology for the discontinuation and destruction of the document. I could not find it anywhere, then I could not turn the computer on or off.
Since neither knitting nor writing worked out, I decided to go to sleep after taking care of the wood stove. However, that did not work either. My son had taken the ash bucket out to empty and had not returned it. It was not on the doorstep and it was too dark for me to try to locate it outside. Only a few small pieces of wood could fit in the stove, not enough to last all night. It did indeed cool off considerably during the night.
Even the light bulb next to my chair had burned out.
When my son came home from work in the morning he had to go searching for that darn ash bucket, which he found inside a shed. He had left the bucket in the shed when he had gone in to check out a shattered window. Even in daylight I would never have found it there!
Today started out better — a nice fire in the wood stove and a new light bulb. And my son had picked up several items from the floor that I had dropped in the dark.
The computer, which he had been able to turn on, displayed the same old trick and erased whatever I wrote.
My frustration must have rubbed off on Rusty, our old and deaf dog, who started barking and barking. I always try to keep the canines quiet when my son is asleep. No matter what I did, though, Rusty kept barking and would not quit. I let him outside and, after a few minutes of barking, he came back inside to continue his barking. Right now, two hours later, he is soundly and peacefully asleep. It is difficult to communicate with this deaf dog. He loves to be patted and brushed. However, that requires bending over on my part, since he flattens out on the floor to enjoy it to the fullest. Scolding him does not penetrate his deaf ears. He responds to love though. He has been a good and faithful dog and he deserves to be treated as such. It would be so much nicer and more convenient if he had become mute as well as deaf.
I hope this column will go out and not vanish in the attempt, since I know I am late and the deadline to get it to The Reporter is overdue. If it won’t go out I might try to start barking like Rusty and see if that will help with battling depression and frustration.
