Making the best of it - Making Lemonade

So one of the benefits to living in the city is it's access to rotating insanity and quirkiness.  There's no end of weird shit downtown, all of which are prime opportunities for inspiration, and great conversation starters.

But part of the charm in the country is the constant access you have to pockets of understated wackiness that bespokes the quiet humour of every day life.  We have pockets like this in our new town.  The most vivid one is a home on the main road coming into town.  Lord only knows who lives in this house, but you have to imagine that it's a retired couple, and the wife is all about keeping the husband out of her hair inside, and so she has challenged him with finding his own source of entertainment outside the house.  Fearful of venturing too far from the kitchen where a seriously kick ass apple pie might be produced, he sticks to what he knows.  He cuts his grass once a week and when he does, he takes advantage of all those Canada Goose decoys his wife has been hounding him about for 30 years.  He creates a tableau with these geese, using all his other found crap from the shed that his wife's been trying to get rid of, just so she'll keep off his back about none of his shit being useful anymore!

And the result is something that you can't help but admire.  It becomes a land mark.  A mile marker for people coming to visit you, so that they know they're still going the right direction.  It becomes a momentary smile of distraction after an other wise harrowing day in the city.  When you see this tableau, you look precisely to see what's different, what's changed, and instantly you know you're 2 minutes and 30 seconds away from walking through your door into solace and comfort: home.

This race took a week for these geese to run across the full width of this person's property.  All of them on children's rocking and bouncy horses.  It honestly gobsmacks me to wonder where in the world this person find 12 rocking horses, and 2 dozen geese.  It's hard to see it in the photo above, but there are at least a dozen geese perched on children's plastic lawn chairs, watching the race.  Presumably they've bet their best goose food on the winner!

And not to be outdone - all these geese in their various poses, there are adult geese, and several goslings.  Check out the teeniest tiniest ones on their little infant rocking horses keeping pace.  

Aside from rocking horse races, these geese have been admiring the Stanley Cup, playing golf, croquet, baseball, and hockey.  They are always fully outfitted, and if I am indeed right, and there is an elderly retired couple living here, I am in awe that they are still married...and I am in awe of the fact that they have made such an awesome creative work out of being happily retired.

I am making a ton of assumptions here, but I can't imagine a life where this is your weekly mission in life, could not bring you so much joy!  

And that's my point my friends.  In every stage of life, there are reasons to be unhappy, and there are reasons for being anxious.  But there are teeny tiny little things that surprise you.  And those teeny tiny things that surprise you - if you're lucky and can be surprised every day - are the things that help to create emotional balance and stability.  Laughter and all those things that make each of us odd and unique are precisely the things that make us healthy.  Even on my darkest days, I find something to laugh at.  And I'm so lucky now to have a flock of plastic geese that will guarantee me that laugh at least once each week.  Find your thing.  And if you are able to find your own thing that will bring that joy to just one other person, dive in and make it happen.  Watching their smile will make yours so much brighter and stronger, and you won't even notice how much work it was!