Gone with the woodpecker

The photo I didn't take.

I have a good life.  I know that and in spite of that knowing sometimes I get grumpy.  I mean REALLY  grumpy. I feel I'm getting old, losing my balance; responsibilities look like burdens; I should exercise and I don't; the dust bunnies in the house are about to chew my foot off and my study looks like a bomb hit it - as usual. I want to cuddle a pet but Odie bites me. My brain knows that these are minor irritations and still, I'm grumpy.

I'm not always sure what causes me to be so cranky but I know what caused it a few days ago.  I woke up from a 'frustration' dream.  I have them often enough to be annoying. The most common one involves being in the wrong school and realizing that my class at the right school is starting and I have to get across town to teach.  A variation is that I've been hired back for one semester after retiring but no one will give me a timetable or tell me what room my class meets in so I wander the halls trying to find out where I should be, worrying about the kids in class with no teacher and worrying that I'm not doing my job.  One dream, not a teaching dream for a change, had me losing a friend's car and running around the neighbourhood trying to find it. When I wake up from such a dream I feel uneasy and frustrated.  That's how I woke up the other morning.

I grumbled my way out to the kitchen and put on the kettle then went over to Odie's cage to lift his cover. I had to cover half way off when a movement at the window caught my eye.  I saw black and white feathers at the edge of the eves trough.  "Magpie," I thought  and then looked more closely.  There it was: a  downy woodpecker.  I stopped, the cage cover in my hands.  The little bird hung upside down from the eves trough, looked around and pecked tentatively at the spot where the eves trough joins the house.  I was within two arm's lengths of him.  After a frozen moment I began to reach for my phone hoping for a picture.  I wasn't slow enough.  The woodpecker flew off and I finished uncovering Odie.  I was smiling. The greyness of the dream was gone and in that instant the colour of the day changed,  thanks to a tiny woodpecker.