Bless This Mess

I heard some great news the other day: it turns out that
we messy people are now in vogue!

It's about time! We have been persecuted for centuries
by the Neatness Police, who made us feel guilty and morally
inferior about being junk junkies.

Society's obsession with order has been driven into our
skulls from Day One. As tots, we were punished for having an
untidy bedroom; as school kids, we endured ritual inspections
wherein judgment was passed regarding the neatness of our
desks. Woe be unto the messy child!

When I reached adulthood I commenced to living life by
my own ramshackle rules. This slovenly situation survived
unscathed until I acquired a spouse.

I at first tried to please my new bride by neatening up
a bit. But as the years passed, she gradually became more and
more tolerant of my untidiness. I figure in another quarter
century or so her transformation will be complete and she
will be an unrepentant junkster like me.

My wife will still occasionally voice her disapproval
about my junkiness, especially the area in and around my
desk.

"Look at this!" she might say. "How can you find
anything in this rat's nest?"

"I have a system," I'll reply. "It's very complicated,
so don't ask me to explain it."

"Your 'system' seems to consist of nothing but a series
of piles! And look at this jumble on the floor!"

"Just give me a second... There! Better?"

"No! Kick cleaning doesn't count!"

"Albert Einstein once said 'If a cluttered desk is a
sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?'"

"Well, I bet he could at least find his desk!"

Slovenly as I may be, I was a but an amateur of
untidiness compared to a farmer I once knew.

I had just started dairying on my own and was in the
market for springing heifers. I was told that a certain
farmer had springers for sale, so I journeyed up to his place
for a look-see.

Pulling onto the farmyard, I at first thought I had
accidentally stumbled onto a salvage yard. The term "junky"
would scarcely begin to describe the farm's epic decrepitude.

As I chatted with the farmer and his son, we walked past
a tractor that appeared to have been dynamited. Randomly
scattered pistons and gears lay rusting under the dolorous
winter sun. When asked what had been wrong with the tractor,
the farmer replied, "Oh, we never did figure that out. We
really ought to put that old Oliver back together someday."

Judging by the riot of weeds growing in and around the
disintegrated tractor, I would bet he'd been making that
statement for good number of years.

Just when I thought things couldn't get any junkier,
they did. Rounding a corner in the narrow lanes of clutter, I
was suddenly confronted by -- a dead horse!

Curious, I asked about the deceased steed. The horse had
gotten out, explained the old farmer, and ran down the road a
piece. The farmer had hopped into his loader tractor and tore
off to retrieve the errant equine.

He lassoed the horse and tied the rope to the loader.
They then headed back toward home, gradually speeding up to a
brisk trot.

As they neared the farmyard, the horse espied his pony
pals and broke into gallop. The sudden slack in the rope
allowed it to become entangled with the tractor's back wheel.
This broke first the horse's neck, then the rope.

"And it was a brand-new lariat, too!" lamented the
farmer at the end of his tale, as if the rope were the
greater loss.

This explained the expired cayuse. But what about the
perfectly circular chunk that was missing from its haunch?
The farmer's son spoke up. "I've never had horsemeat, so
I cut off a roast and wrapped it in foil and threw it in the
freezer before Ma got home!"

It took a couple of hours for us to pick our way through
the warren of pens and junk. By the time we got done looking
at heifers it was dinnertime, and the farmer politely asked
if I would like to come into their house for a bite.

I politely declined. I don't know, but am willing to bet
that the house was just as messy as the rest of the place and
that a certain foil-wrapped package had gone missing from the
freezer. And that was not good news.