My Days Are Numbered — And So Are My Minutes

I don’t know about you, but my days are numbered. I’ve got only so many left.

According to the handy app PlanetCalc, even if I live to be 100 — if! — I’ve got a mere 5,844 days left on the planet.

(Make that 5,834 if I go the way of my grandmother. She died a month short of her hundreth birthday, determined though she was to make it to the century mark.)

My days are numbered, and I’ve decided to be miserly about how I spend what’s left of them. I pick and choose.

A Shrub That’s Too Big for Its Britches

That plant in the front yard, the one’s that’s totally pretty, but has gotten way too big for its britches? It’s got to go. It’s blocking my view of the azalea at the top of the garden. It’s crowding out the pansies. It’s upstaging the geraniums and the trumpet vine.

But — how much time do I want to spend on disposing of that lusty, pink and green bush — probably a myrtle-leaf milkwort — with its bossy will to live? Do I take the time to offer it to a neighbor?  Or just dig it up and send it off to compost heaven?

Unlike some people roaming the planet right now, I don’t like killing things. Just yesterday morning I put down my toothbrush to rescue a spider from the bathroom sink. I scooped the leggy thing up with a drinking glass and a piece of cardboard and escorted him (her?) to the yard.

I spent a full five minutes of the 8,416,360 minutes left to me on that spider. Now I was down to 8,416,355.

Offering the oversized shrub to my neighbor feels like a great idea and worth splurging my minutes on. Chatting with my neighbor about where to put the plant, contacting my favorite gardener to do the job, and saving a beautiful, if pushy, plant from the compost heap — all good uses of my remaining 8,416,355 minutes.

My Days Are Numbered — And So Are My Minutes

And that’s what I had planned to do — until yesterday, when my neighbor texted that she couldn’t use my lusty shrub after all. However, she said, the  the family that had just moved in across the street might like to have it. They had the perfect spot I should offer the bush to them.

That would be a nice thing to do. Very nice. Ring the neighbor’s doorbell, offer them a plant to fill that bare spot in their yard, chat a bit, get to know them. Add another family to the circle of people I care about and who care about me. Do something nice for them and for the green and pink milkwort bush. Spend a couple of hours — an afternoon? — making it all happen.

No. My days are numbered. I don’t have an afternoon to spare.

Instead, I telephoned my daughter. We talked for fifteen minutes or so. Her 19-year-old cat had used up all its days. It had cancer. It was in pain. Later in the day there would be a veterinarian and a lethal injection. My daughter would hold her cat in her lap as it breathed its last.