When Life Delivers a Truckload of Manure onto Your Driveway

It takes him only about seventeen seconds to unload the truck onto my driveway. We spend the next seven and a half years shoveling and spreading it all around our property. 

I am too mad to speak, so we spend the rest of that day shoveling in silence. That night I take three consecutive showers, rubbing the epidermis off my body in futile attempt to remove the stench. I smother myself with Channel 5 perfumed body lotion trying to cover it up and collapse in bed, too tired to read. My husband grabs his pillow and blanket and torpedoes out of the bedroom, choosing to sleep on the couch in the library. I don’t blame him. I would do the same thing if I had a skunk sleeping in the same bed. He swears it’s the perfume that bothers him more than the manure.

Even though we peck at the mountain all next day, we hardly put a dent in it. 

The Space Gardener runs to Subway and brings pastrami and pepper-jack cheese on Italian Parmesan for lunch, but my appetite is gone. I shake my head, No, to a piece of key lime pie and to a strawberry cheesecake the following day. I can tell by his look that he is getting concerned. I never say no to key lime pie, and I would kill for a slice of strawberry cheesecake. 

I don’t understand how he can eat leaning against the side of a cow-dung mountain.

I try to pawn out some of the manure to the neighbors, but they tell me they have enough crap of their own to deal with and politely refuse.

After the sunset, I throw several shovelfuls across the backyard fence, but a little later hear the neighbor yelling at his dog for rolling in it.

I wonder if my life will ever return to normal... And what is normal? I ask myself.  I am not sure I know the answer to that question any more.


Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word. Psalm 119:67

It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn Your statues. Psalm 119:71