It was, on the surface, a little soy sauce dish. But it was a soy sauce dish that belonged to my grandmother, that she bought on one of her trips to Japan. Although I have a lot of my dead grandmother's things, losing even one of them doesn't feel good.
My fault really. I have no idea how that dish got in her room, why it was on a high shelf, why it was in the way when she decided to climb up preposterously on an ad-hoc step-stool made of a giant stuffed unicorn and a giraffe-coat-rack in order to retrieve an equally ill-placed package of glow-in-the-dark sidewalk-chalk...but clearly I must have had a hand in creating the situation, somewhere along the line.
Which brings me to a problem that's been plaguing me of late. Really the problem is a plague. A plague of crap. Crap on every horizontal surface in my room, stacked in piles that would alarm even the Cat in the Hat on a rainy day visit. Pre-school art, toddler shoes, tiny little doll accessories, stuffed animals, Legos, crayons, plastic fruit, blankets, puzzle pieces, comically giant paper clips, regular paper clips, fingernail clippings, stray pieces of string cheese...all in vertical piles three feet high on every available surface. There's no "away". I can't really give in to my barely-containable urges to beat the children within in an inch of their lives when I step on the sadistically painfully sharp fluke of a plastic whale in my family room if said whale has no "away".
So what will I get for my disorganizational crimes? Tally for today:
- broken soy sauce dish, probably made by some adorable septuagenarian artisan in Kyoto
- broken foot (the whale is unscathed of course)
- children who will, in all likelihood, be swearing like sailors by the time they enter kindergarten
- a hangover tomorrow
- one less thing to remember my sweet Gram by
My Gram probably would have called Tempest a rapscallion or a rag-a-muffin. I call her a fucking-remorseless-asshole-sent-by-the-Devil-to-torment-me-daily.
Not to her face, of course. She's way too cute.
