I’m not a huge whiner.  I said whiner, not winer.  That’s a whole different issue.  I am a person who, usually, sees the glass as half full.  Again, not the wine glass, that’s a different issue.

I get sad in the winter, though.  I am NOT a Christmas lover.  I loathe it.  I hate the mess, the drama, the sugary foods, tacky sweaters and the color red in general.  It just makes me grouchy.  The gloomy weather, though, makes me downright sad.

I’ve always been this way.  My mother, the True Southern Lady, recognized this and used to take me out of school to ride through the country on a sunny day so I could absorb a sliver of vitamin D.  Today, I take more than 35,000 units of D and still can’t stay on top of the blahs.  A week like this last one leaves me clinging to the Goose as he leaves for work, begging him to stay in bed and watch sappy movies. It forces me to rest my head on my children and expect them to tell me I am the center of their world.  It prompts me and my dog, Matilda, to gaze balefully at each other and sigh.  She gets it.

I know that exercise is a great remedy for what ails me so, considering the rain today, I dragged myself to the gym and listened to inappropriate music designed to further damage my aged ears.  I felt better.  Much better!  Then I came home.

Home should be a clean and serene place.  An oasis.  Today I came home to two bored dogs and a pig loose in the house.  Babette has rounded a corner to become a friendly and sweet pig.  She’s a jumping pig and launches herself onto my white sofa several times a day.  I have an entire stack of snout cleaning towels in my laundry room.  She had rooted up most of the yard, removed all my pansies and decorative cabbages and turned over two garden statues. Still, I love that little swine.

The thing about pigs is, they are hungry, and they are smart.  They oink about it about once every three seconds, rhythmically, loudly and with a passion.  They hear the most covert opening of a Kit Kat bar in the kitchen, no matter how hard one hides.  In all the years my dogs have lived with me they have never entertained the notion that they could find food in the house and feed themselves. Today, Babette learned to open the cabinets and serve herself.  She then helped out her friends, the dogs, and together, they devoured some Apple Jacks, several Kit Kat bars, chips, drink mix, pet treats (which I am thinking were pork flavored and I shudder at the cannibalistic implications), some oatmeal pies, unpopped popcorn and some straws. She even gnawed through the prune container.  That’s dedication.  She was straining the elastic on her pink harness when I arrived home, fat and swollen, but is even now trying other cabinets to see what treasures they hold.  The dogs have named her their messiah and are in awe of her ingenuity.

So, I no longer have time to be sad and gloomy. This house looks like a set for a scary movie.  The Goose says I love any emergency in which something must be cleaned or repaired.  He once dropped a can of latex paint in the kitchen and just stood there and said “Go to it!  You know you love it.” and it’s true. I just need a mission, no matter how lame.  We all do.  So I’ll get to it now, turn on all the lights, turn up some of the kids loud music with lyrics that make me blush and clean up for when my family comes back in from the world and tracks mud right back across the floor. Days like today cause me to want to sniff my coconut oil furniture polish and dream of summer.