Three months

 

Have you ever just left something to see how long fill-in-the-blank?

We can rephrase the question. In fact, let’s just really present it a bit differently.

Terry and I have lived in a few houses together. And every time we’ve moved into one, for the first year, we just sort of wait and see with some of the landscaping. Did the previous owners plant flowers? What does the sunshine look like on a sunny day in the spring? …or summer when the leaves are on the trees?

There are times when you leave something alone to see what happens. And, occasionally, there are times when you leave something alone without even having bigger plans in mind.

Of course, this isn’t about where daffodils might show up unexpectedly or investigating locations for a garden. It’s about balloons.

(Admit it, you didn’t see that transition coming. And yet here we go…)

A few months ago, a great friend dropped off a bag with some presents for Terry’s birthday. A few balloons were attached to the bag. At some point, roughly two to three weeks after her birthday, Terry asked me to get rid of the balloons. So, I moved them. And that’s when the fun started.

Initially I moved them near my desk. I couldn’t bring myself to just get rid of them, and even though they were for her birthday, they made me smile.

What can I say? I like balloons.

It’s not because I really like balloons. It’s because our first dog, Lady, went bonkers whenever there were balloons around. It’s as if she thought they were the source of all evil in the world, she needed to protect us, and the way to accomplish that was by barking at them to make sure they didn’t move. Eventually you would be forced to move them someplace where she could no longer see them.

It was hysterical. But it was the arrival of our second dog, Travis, that completed the show. Lady would wonder into a room, look up, and see the balloons nestled against the ceiling and in a corner. And she would begin barking at them. Not taking her eyes off them, barking. Travis would run into the room and join her in barking. However, he had no idea why she was barking. It was if he couldn’t even see the balloons, but Lady was barking and acting defensive, so he felt as if he should be barking and acting defensive. But because he didn’t know what all the fuss was about, he kept spinning around.

And there they were… a black Labrador standing in place, staring up and barking… and a chocolate Labrador, barking while bouncing up and down and all around the room not at all finding what he was supposed to be barking at.

So, yeah, I like balloons.

And I kept Terry’s three balloons.

A few days after moving them, the first one began to fall to the ground. That’s when I started wondering how long it would be before all of the balloons dropped to the floor. The game of wait and see had started.

Turns out the first one was a bit out of whack, because the second balloon didn’t begin dropping for two more weeks. It eventually hit the ground about five days later. Not a bad run as it approached six weeks, but the third balloon put them to shame.

My desk is in the basement. After the first balloon hit the ground, I decided to slide them away from my desk and more toward the stairs I use when I come down. The second and third balloon, for reasons I still don’t understand, managed to drift a bit, curve into the stairwell, and rise all the way up to the ceiling. That made for a pretty neat way to check in on them each day… open the door to head down to write, check the balloons in front of me.

I was not planning on the experiment to last as long as it did.

Three months. Or, more precisely, eighty-seven days.

I don’t know if balloons would ever last that long again. I doubt if I’ll try in the future, but I make no promises about that. What I do know is that there aren’t a lot of wait-and-see experiments in my house that would last more than a week or two. And I know this because the effort I based on leaving the empty suitcases near the dining room table only made it ten days before Terry voiced her opinion on that one.

Three months. I’d like to think Lady and Travis would have enjoyed that.

 

If you have any comments or questions, please e-mail me at Bob@inmybackpack.com