The Poop Cleats

We rented our house in Colorado out for a year and a half while we were in Phoenix, Arizona. What we came back to was, well, less than ideal. We have now been back in the house for a year and most of the fix-up projects are getting closer to being done. At the moment, it is my bathroom linoleum bugging me.
When I clean my linoleum floors, I get down on all fours because it soothes my OCD better than if I had used a mop. **Every once in a while I will use my Shark** So every week for the last year, while on all fours in my bathroom, I have to laugh because you see, there are cleat marks on the linoleum in front of the toilet. There are no cleat marks anywhere else, just in front of the toilet. Of course my imagination ran away with me the very first time I noticed them and now I never clean that spot without an image popping into my head.
What image do you get?
The image I get is…well, I think the “poop cleats” (as I lovingly call them), gave someone some bracing for a very messy job!

 This week while finally sharing my “humor” with my husband, I realized the parallel this story has to real-life and thus, “Poop cleats, you have to dig in to get the work done” was born!
Sometimes life gets so hard. Sometimes we need a brace to stand against the trials. Sometimes life feels like nothing more than a messy job. And almost always, no matter how we come out of the bathroom — uh, I mean, the trials — there are still lasting marks to keep us from completely forgetting where we used to be.
Who of us wouldn’t want to avoid trials? Try as we may, they have a way of finding us anyway. Once the trial is at our doorstep, we still sometimes have a tendency to practice avoidance yet all the while knowing the problem isn’t going anywhere. It will linger. What if – just like the character in my mental image did – we really just made a plan and dug in, stayed focused and braced ourselves for the storm? All the while telling ourselves it would be over in no time and we would be healthier (and lighter!!) for it.
“Life’s A Garden, Dig It” Joe Dirt