"Turning the other cheek--or leaf--as the case may be."

For those of you still following along on this crazy train you will know that my last post centered on the rude comment my neighbor made about the leaf situation at our house.  As you can imagine, this has generated a lot of comments from my family and friends.  When I told Dave about it he remarked that it was a good thing his "two hour wind dance" had paid off.  My friend Stephanie had a brilliant idea to take shifts under the tree to catch each leaf--I seriously laughed out loud at that one.  I am not going to lie--her comment seriously stuck in my craw, so to speak.  I found myself thinking about it every time I looked at the leaves and it was riling me up! I kept thinking about what witty comment I could make in reply should she happen to judge me again and by the end of the week I had plenty of them on deck, I'll have you know.

The other thing her comment did was make me NOT want to go out there and rake--like my own silent protest of sorts but a couple of days ago I bit the bullet and spent several hours over the course of a couple of days cleaning up the mess.  Here's the outcome:

We managed to rake up 15 bags of leaves and the yard is full again--and the whole time I was raking I kept thinking about that dumb comment and getting more and more feisty.  (Doesn't this woman know that I have a to- do list a mile long and raking up leaves falls below "Candy Crush" on that list?  Does she just sit around in her house all day judging my yard and if so, I can't imagine what she has to say about the recurring mole situation.  And if she thinks that poorly of my yard, heaven help us if she looks in the window and catches a glimpse of the sock piles and mystery plunger that seem to persist.)

Which leads me to yesterday--I was on hour three (3!) of leaf detail and by this point I had strapped the leaf sucker -upper thing to me and was plugging away when I looked up and guess who was in my yard---right in front of me?  Yep--THE NEIGHBOR!!!  As you can imagine, I was furiously going through all of my snappy comebacks I'd stockpiled because this time, for crying out loud, I was going to be prepared!  But guess what?  The neighbor sheepishly pulled out two pints of raspberries and offered an apology!  She told me she had been having a bad day and what she said was out of line and it had been bothering her for the last week!  At this point I was back to being speechless other than to say, thanks and offer this brilliant remark:  "It's just a really big tree."  (I know, I know--eloquence is speaking is apparently not my forte.)

So after all my complaining and obsessing and seeking for retribution I learned a valuable lesson.  I learned that sometimes we are just having a bad day and we say stupid things.  And on the converse side I learned that we need to be careful of saying stupid things because there are people out there (like me apparently) who will put way too much stock into those stupid things.

My goal for this week is to try to be better about letting things go--at least the things that don't matter.  In the meantime, I'm off to suck up more leaves.  Again.