Abby's Alley

My Irish Breakfast tea tasted like Lawry’s Taco Seasoning the morning we came back from our vacation. The tea and the seasonings were zip locked together during the fumigation. The apple jelly’s top wasn’t on all the way, and it dripped down my loose-leaf Oolong bags and pooled on the bottom of the plastic sacks; and the bottle of picnic-sized balsamic vinegar leaked black dots on my spice jars. The burning-red Kangaroo Paws that I’d planted below the freshly painted staircase don’t look like they’re going to make it. Their leaves are half crispy; their flowers, all faded. The Boston Ivy is a stubby bush again; all its fingers that had crept over the ugly wall outside our studio door are chopped. The furniture was sprinkled with dust; dust bunnies rolled over the laminate flooring upstairs. I guess nothing can be good after coming back from a vacation like that. Nothing at all. Phil and I have been suffering from post-vacation blues. I want to see the mountains again. I wan

     “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)      “Poor boy! How little you know about things! Mr. Coleman’s lost all his money, and your father has nothing to do, and we shall have nothing to eat by and by.”      “Are you sure mother?”      “Sure of what?”      “Sure that we shall have nothing to eat.”      “No thank Heaven! I’m not sure of it. I hope not.”      “Then I can’t understand it, mother. There’s a piece of gingerbread in the basket, I know.”     “O you little bird! You have no more sense than a sparrow that picks what it wants, and never thinks of the winter and the frost and the snow.”      “Ah—yes—I see. But the birds get through the winter, don’t they?”      “Some of them fall dead on the ground.”      “They must die some time. They wouldn’t like to be birds always. Would you, mother?”