Human beings have a weird tendency to project ridiculous ideals on themselves. Until someone or something sets them straight and they learn to embrace and live with who they really are. For me, it was my dog and a cherry tree. Yeah, a cherry tree. And my doggo.
Several years ago, my husband Olivier and I bought a house out in the countryside. Like many people in the same situation, we wandered through the empty rooms seeing nothing as it actually was. We only saw everything as it could be. None of the rooms appeared empty. We were operating under a hallucination, each corner filled with our furniture. Our wall art, bric-a-brac, and books. From room to room, projecting ourselves into the blank spaces. Each of us meandering through our own personalized holodeck.
Outside, we inhaled the scent wafting from the lavender bushes and craned our necks to gaze up at the tops of the tall pines in the front yard. We imagined ourselves happily plucking the bright red strawberries growing in the backyard, and babbled about all of the things we could make with the fruit from the plum tree. But what really seemed like a gift was the big cherry tree next to the long driveway, already bursting with fruit. The bright sentinel that greeted us with little flowers as we rolled down the drive toward our new home.
We had barely anything at all unpacked before we traipsed outside to pick cherries. One bowl full after another, we brought them inside. We sat on our couch, propped our feet up on a cardboard box and watched old TV shows from the 90s while noshing the fruit of our labor.
Before long, the hallucination that formed as I stood in each empty room of the house increased in strength. It no longer filled the rooms, but clouded my own perception of myself. Even though I’ve always hated yardwork and loathed gardening, I had a vision of myself gathering fruit from outside and sitting at the kitchen table pitting cherries and slicing strawberries. With extreme clarity, I saw my serene doppelganger removing pies from the oven and standing at the kitchen counter chopping rhubarb.
Oh, I forgot to mention — there was fucking rhubarb, too.
What I imagined was a picturesque and meditative rural life. Even though the cherries we’d picked days before were so numerous that no matter how many we ate, we couldn’t reach the bottom of the bowl before the plump, dark red fruits of all this new potential began to morph into something squishy, fuzzy, and weird-smelling.
It didn’t take long before the holodeck images dissipated. What seemed like an adventure full of possibilities just became a lot of work. Each day, there were reasons for me to put off writing because each of those rooms became a reality that required work. All of those damn things growing outside were more work. I couldn’t write because I now had the burden of becoming this imaginary person.
That winter, we got a dog.
That spring, the cherry tree came back to life.
By then, we weren’t excited about the cherries anymore. We grew lazy about picking them. Somewhere in my mind, I still clung to the delusion of a bizarro version of myself who would harvest fruit, chopping it and putting in goddamn jars or whatever people do with all those piles of fruit.
Then came the morning that my dog set me straight. See, we were slacking on the cherry picking, but Mooshie was very diligent about gathering up every single cherry that fell off that tree. I awoke one morning to the sounds of my husband speaking in loud, confused sentence fragments. I scurried down the stairs, and found myself standing in the middle of a disgusting battlefield. It was as though David Cronenberg had recreated the pie-eating contest scene from Stand by Me in our living room. Enormous landmines of dog shit, cherry pits, and bright red dog vomit were scattered all over the powder blue carpet like a nauseating Twister mat.
At the center of this fruity fecal quagmire was our pup, wagging her tail, clearly pleased to display her work.
After our dog was checked out, once all the shit and puke was cleared away, and the carpet shampooed, things came back into focus. Each room of the house appeared exactly as it was. I appeared exactly as I was. Olivier gathered some plums and made jam. He collected a bunch of cherries and made sorbet. He chopped rhubarb and strawberries. He made some killer desserts and put things in those goddamn jars. I curled up with my books. And I got back to work at writing. I’m not domestic like that. For a moment, it seemed like it might be fun, but standing among all that cherry dog shit reminded me that I was out of my element.
It’s easy to get distracted by shiny things, to paint an image in your mind of an alternate version of yourself that doesn’t line up with reality. You make a bunch of pretty plans, only to find yourself standing in the middle of a bunch of unexpected shit. Maybe, like in this case, it is literal shit. Sometimes, all you need to get some perspective is to stand among several enormous piles of poop and vomit, take a deep breath in and say, “Ah, yeah… this makes more sense.”
And if you’re the kind of person who gets easily sidetracked, you should probably get a dog to keep you in line.
