Folly

At times like this, it'd be great to know what I was doing.

Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs

It's 2:35 a.m. and I've got to agree with Mike, it'd be great to know what I was doing.

Instead, I've been laying awake for an hour and a half pondering the folly of my life.

My van doors, all four of them and the hatchback, have at some point refused to open this last week- deer damage, ice, jammed locks.  It's been The Dukes of Hazard around here- sliding through and climbing over. Unfortunately, I'm not as agile as Bo and Luke nor as mechanical.  Fortunately, at least one door has worked every day and it's been a different one every couple days so everyone's had a chance to slide and climb.  Equal opportunity folly.  How very American.

Then, snow removal on our steep driveway.  Truck with plow starts like a charm on Tuesday thanks to the new fuel line Tim installed with foresight just in time for the first big snowfall.  It snows Wednesday.  A lot.  Deep, heavy, wet snow.  Truck with plow has dead battery at top of insanely steep driveway.  Car with which to jump it at bottom of same.  We shovel hard for an hour, still can't get the car to the truck, and then decide to remove the battery and bring it by hand to the car to charge it, Mohamed-and-mountain style.  Two hours, seven stalls, and a couple ups and downs the driveway by foot later, our driveway is plowed as is the neighbor's we'd promised to help.  And the truck is stalled at the top blocking the driveway.  Doesn't matter much since the driveway is still too slick to drive up reliably anyway.  At that point I hit the wall, start hot cocoa for Tim, soak in an epsom salt bath, and miss how precisely Tim solves this problem, which he does.

Yesterday, Thursday, is picking freezing and the wet heavy snow of Wednesday night is now rock hard ice.  Yet buying club duties call.  Mark slides down the driveway on his new sled while I shuffle like a penguin hoping to stay vertical.  Several hours of work and running around later, I return heavy laden with food, over a hundred pounds, including fresh bananas, raspberries, and greens which will all be ruined if I let them sit in the van and freeze until help comes.  Mark brings me the new sled and like Santa, or like Rudolph really, I load the sled with food and start pulling it up the steep, ice encrusted drive.  Stuff keeps falling off my sled so I climb pulling with one hand while carrying with the other.  Raspberries were the worst since when they fell they scattered all over.  I take my gloves off to pick them up gently, forget to put my gloves on, start pulling with the rope digging into my right hand, most of two flats of red raspberries tucked under my left.  I get to the steepest part which is of course right at the top so I have something to look forward to and I start to loose traction and slip backwards with absolutely no hands to catch myself if I fall.  Anger, pain, anxiety, sweat, chill, and urgent need- I bend low, reposition the rope, pant hard, and slip my way to the top, muttering about folly.

Which is the greater folly?  To build a house in Minnesota on top of an impossible driveway or to buy said house in June without even considering it?  To hope in mechanical, labor-saving devices so much that one winds up laboring harder or to refuse to have the good sense to stay home when it snows or to simply park at the bottom of the driveway and forget plowing and shoveling the whole freaking mess?  

There's plenty of folly to go around this morning. 

In my head I hear, "Gosh, just hire a professional, lady.  Get yourself a snowblower.  Buy some sand and sprinkle it.  Get yourself a decent vehicle, a truck with four-wheel drive.  Heck, get yourself a snowmobile.  Quit whining, already.  You're a Minnesotan, for Pete's sake."  

But is the folly in not anticipating or solving my problems or in the fact that I keep trying so hard to win the unwinnable?

Not a new question.  Here's Solomon on the subject.

 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
    says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
    Everything is meaningless.”

 What do people gain from all their labors
    at which they toil under the sun?

Generations come and generations go,
    but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets,
    and hurries back to where it rises. 

 The wind blows to the south
    and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
    ever returning on its course. 

 All streams flow into the sea,
    yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
    there they return again. 

 All things are wearisome,
    more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
    nor the ear its fill of hearing. 

 What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

 Is there anything of which one can say,
    “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
    it was here before our time. 

 No one remembers the former generations,
    and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
    by those who follow them.

A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink 

and find satisfaction in their own toil. 

This too, I see, is from the hand of God,   

for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?   

To the person who pleases him, 

God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, 

but to the sinner he gives the task of 

gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over 

to the one who pleases God. 

This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Ah, a little Ecclesiastes in the morning does a woman good.  It's not just me and it's not just vans and driveways and snow.  It's life and the nature of being human. 

Despite the fact my problems just got more universal and less solvable, I feel better in a perverse way.    

And his advice makes me feel better, too.  I ate a good dinner of La Finca chili and Kutney pork, watched MacGyver with Anjali, shot Nerf guns with Mark, ate raspberries, and laughed at myself in my blog.  According to the wisest guy ever, that's as good as it gets and means God is pleased with me.  Who am I to argue?