So, You Just Help.

The lesson learned, folks, though it's a lesson that really needs no learning, is that there are people tremendously worse off than you are. And, I feel, there's an obligation to do the stupid little things you can do to help them.

The woman at whose house I ended up lost her husband a couple of years back to skin cancer. She has a gaggle of very small children. And, she has breast cancer. There were about ten of us there at the busiest point. We weeded, laid mulch, washed windows, cleaned refrigerators, and at the end, I was atop a ladder scraping paint for a future repainting of an upstairs window.

I was the lone non-Catholic there, and I ended up in a back corner of the back yard at a little garden shrine set up for the Virgin Mary. Lots of weeds, lots of everything. I'm not a gardener, so I ended up having to make a lot of judgment calls regarding what was a weed and what was not. I cleaned things up the best I could. I felt like this spot of the yard was important. I dug deep, pulling out grass, dislodging worms, pulling away dead leaves. This place seemed important. Several times, I almost knocked Mary over, which brought forth a great deal of mental scenarios- I will replace plaster Mary, where might I find a plaster Mary, my God, I shattered plaster Mary, etc. But, in the end, I did the best job I could do in a small section of the lawn reserved for Hope. Mayhaps a place where the owner looks out from the kitchen and sees something that gives her solace. I tried my best to make everything perfect. Everybody did. But, you realize, obviously, that there are just some things that cannot be covered with mulch and made right. In a week, the grass and weeds whose roots I did not quite extricate will push forth through the mulch. The small stage of serenity will have its actors unmasked, and ugliness will again take its place. This woman's life and challenges will continue, things will get hard, harder.

And- it's an awful feeling. One cannot spend a day at hard work and at the end feel that stuff's great. It's ongoing. And, in the end, for what?

Dammit!

As I stood atop a ladder, pretending I knew how to scrape paint, I looked through the window and saw beautiful children playing. They waved to me, and I waved back. I smiled, all the while terrified of the strong wind and choking and squinting from a snow of paint chips. "What happens next?" was all I could think.

But, that's not for me.

That's not for me.

What is is the realization that I would spend every weekend of my life doing any stupid little thing I could to take away a percentage of the pain that some people must endure.

But- I won't. No one does. We do our part, we feel the way I am feeling right now, and then we go right back to complaining about bills and taxes and the fact that there's nothing in the fridge for dinner.

By writing this, I hope that I remember to Remember.