Oh Nuts! Murphy, GO AWAY!

  It has been a month of wrongs.  No matter how I try, it seems that old "If anything can go wrong" Murphy's Law has been in full force here lately.  First, the dining room chandelier went bad.  Mark took me down to get another but that one wound up in a corner of our living room so the dining room is still "lightless".  Then, after a bit of daring me, the washing machine stood up to its threats and stopped doing the spin cycle.  Oh, great!  Hand wringing clothes is not bad but when it comes to blankets and such, I draw the line! Next on old Murphy's list was my stove.  Yep, the burners started going out one by one.  Being the frugal sort, I kept insisting that I did not need four burners anyway.  Then it was "no one needs three burners" and now with another slowly dying, I will soon be down to one burner.  The guys might have a long wait for their supper.  Add to that a refrigerator that has now made its debut as a heater and you can see my predicament. It seems as if I need to go appliance shopping.  Poor Mark!  Then to top it all off, my laptop has a bug.  Nope, it does not have a virus but sure sounds like it has a swarm of bees buzzing around inside it. Son, being our computer tech dude, checked it and said that the fan has gone bad.  Well, that is just not fun at all!  So, as a whole, the month of May was just about filled with catastrophes!

  My brain was reeling with all of the weird happenings as I was out weeding the okra.  Geez!  Something just has to give!  Somewhere, somehow, something has to happen that is good.  I figure that the month of June has got to be better....or at least I hope.  Anyway, as I was down on my knees and up to my elbows in Horse Nettles, I figured I would look for a sign that things were going to improve.  Not thinking I would find some neon-flashing marquee sign hanging in the garden, I looked for anything that could be a positive.  I found weeds.  I found ants.  I found stinkbugs.  None of those seemed to be a promising sign so I searched a bit harder.  Nothing.  

  A bit later, I pondered the past month again.  This time, I was sitting on the yard bench in the cooling breeze.  A bit of sewing needed to be done and it was just too hot in the house.  As I sat in the breeze whipping that needle back and forth, it hit me.  If I have to search for a sign, then it really does not count!  To be an absolute omen, it has to find me, not me find it!  Ok!  Now that we had that settled, I felt more at ease and kept sewing.  Once I completed my project, I stood to head back inside.  There, right at my feet, was a happy!  I found my sign that all was good.  A hickory nut had been split in half by my step and the insides formed the perfect heart!  Yep, this was a good omen!

 In short, I suppose we all look for signs or omens of things to come. Whether we believe in them or whether we shrug them off as just a coincidence, matters not.  What does matter is the fact that we cannot completely leave our lives to happenstance.  If we want things to be better, then we have to get up, get to work and make things go the way we want.  It just takes a bit of hard work...not a broken hickory nut.