Stream of Consciousness

There was a small Post-It on the ground next to my car in the parking lot.  I nearly stepped on it when I got out of my car.  It was a bit dirty because somebody else had stepped on it before I got there.  I leaned over so I could see what it said.  “You are awesome,” it said.  If somebody had given me a PostIt telling me I was awesome I would have it cast in Lucite and stuck to the fridge with a magnet.  Or at the very least enshrined in my wallet where I could bathe in its glory two or three times a day.  Who could so carelessly throw such a priceless artifact on the ground for strangers to step on?
Maybe the doting parent of some child who had received 80% on a spelling test had rewarded the unwilling scholar with this little yellow attaboy and was even now inside the grocery story buying sweets to reinforce this appreciation.
It was an odd day anyway, full of surprises, starting early in the morning when I heard a tumult out in the pond and discovered that the source was a family of otters that was guzzling down fishes at a great rate. This explained two observations that had piqued my curiosity: first that the muskrats that had been much in evidence all summer had suddenly vanished, and second that I had never seen a fish in the pond larger than a credit card.  I stood out there in the dewy grass in my pajamas watching my visitors porpoising through the cattails and squabbling with each other behind the shrubbery until they finally oozed off over the far bank and vanished down toward the creek.
On the other hand, it might have been the child who left this little billet doux for its mother, stuck to the coffee pot, say, or the bathroom mirror.  Someplace where she was sure to find it before she got into the car and discovered that this same child had left a half gallon of butterscotch ripple ice cream on its side on the back seat of the car two or three days ago under a towel and forgotten it and now it had melted and escaped its cardboard confines and what had not been absorbed by the foam padding of the seat had bonded to the velour upholstery in a rapidly discoloring pad about the size of any bottom that might ever seek to reside there, an error that the child just discovered this morning when it went out to look for its bicycle helmet and noticed the smell.  That would explain why the note had been thrown to the ground right next to the rear door of some vehicle.  It might also explain why it had been stepped on.
Then on the way home I passed by that place at the top of Audet’s hill where they used to sell really nice corn, but I hadn’t seen their corn sign up in years.  They seemed to have given up edibles entirely in favor of chrysanthemums which I have no great need of.  But now there was the corn sign again, so I stopped in and got some.  And some beets since I was there. And then on my way out through the thousand chrysanthemums I noticed an enclave of peonies.  Always on the lookout for peonies that are not pink I had a quick look to see what there was and by miraculous good fortune there were several Karl Rosenfelds described on the internet (which does not lie) as “deep crimson.” So in one serendipitous visit I got 2 fine, red peonies and a compelling reason to clear the nettles out of the far end of the flower bed.  Not to mention a plate of corn, which, to be honest, was a bit disappointing.
But then it might have been delivered with a smirk by somebody who had carefully noted the progress of another family member through an entropy storm during which the participant had tripped over the dog, flinging spaghetti over one whole quadrant of the kitchen, then slipping on a meatball and falling into the table causing a cascade of tossed salad, chocolate milk, and merlot along with a scatter of small items like action figures, Tabasco bottles, spoons and such, then while windmilling for balance, still with a firm grip on the once full plate of spaghetti, depositing tomato sauce in colorful streaks on the ceiling, fridge, and remaining walls before finally regaining a solid upright position.  Surely such a performance would deserve at least a PostIt note.
And when I finally did get home and got a chance to look through the great wodge of mail that had been stuffed into my mailbox with such force that I had to winkle it out one envelope at a time until there was finally enough slack to move a catalog, there was an actual letter.  While it is certainly true that my memory is not what it once was, I can clearly remember those distant times when getting a letter was, if not routine, then at least unremarkable.  Yet there I was down there in the Shoreham Post Office lobby with a slithering armload of catalogs and demands for money from a dozen or two non-profits looking down in astonishment at an actual letter that some distant person had actually written to me and then put into an envelope and paid 44¢ to mail.  It gave me an odd feeling of time travel.
I like to think, though, that this was a note left by somebody for their lover, stuck to the wrapping of a small box or a nice plant and that this little scrap fell off while they were giggling together there in the parking lot, their arms around each other right there on the painted stripe between the cars.