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The importance of being ridiculous

There are crab legs on the roof of the woodshed
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Yeah - my coworkers are truly ridiculous. Andrea DeMeer

There are crab legs on the roof of the woodshed.

Capitalize all those words and it sounds like an edgy poem, or an Amazon Prime miniseries.

However, it’s just a fact.

There are crab legs on the roof of the woodshed.

Don’t ask me how they got there. I’ve no idea. I just live here.

I discovered them when the snow began melting. I was barbecuing hamburgers, looked up, saw the crab legs.

They puzzled me. They continue to do so.

For one thing I’m the only person in our household who eats crab legs and they certainly don’t belong to me.

There is a bag of crab legs in the freezer but it hasn’t been opened.

Is there a secret admirer somewhere, attempting to catch my notice by leaving out shellfish?

Note to self: Check the garage for a posy of flowers and lobster tails.

It made me laugh until I could barely stand, and was a reminder of how much one could miss in life if she failed to embrace, appreciate and respect the ridiculous.

It’s possible it is related to COVID cabin fever, this idea of pursuing absurdity.

Yet ridiculousness has always been an important part of my life.

Never was that so evident when the DeMeer family moved from the very urban southwestern Ontario to the very rural Princeton, B.C., six years ago.

Frankly, everything seemed ridiculous at first and it felt at times like we’d moved to an entirely different country, or planet.

What do you mean I have to pay a health insurance premium? Health care in Canada is free. We are internationally famous for it. Everyone knows that.

Why are there bears on my street? Aren’t there provincial parks for those things?

Seriously? You actually can’t get there from here?

I remember most vividly driving back to town from Copper Mountain Mine, shortly after our arrival.

All of a sudden my car was surrounded by cows. Big ones. There were at least a dozen.

In Ontario, you understand, we mostly keep our cows in barns.

The cows just stood there, looking at me.

Maybe they’d never seen a 1986 Lexus before.

I honked the horn, waved my arms, rolled down the window and yelled “MOOOOOOOVE.”

Eventually I just leaned back and laughed so hard and so long that tears rolled down my face and I had to pee. The release of the ridiculous.

It’s possible to create that amazing feeling with intent.

Over the Christmas holidays, for example, in a moment of extreme boredom I crafted co-workers out of left-over fall vegetables.

Working from home, and alone if you don’t count the kids, the husband and the dog, can be unsatisfying.

No one to talk things over with.

Channelling the spirit of the incredible British comedian Miranda Hart, I took a glue gun and some craft supplies from the dollar store and made three veggie colleagues out of mini squashes.

I call all of them Gordon.

They sit on my desk. I vent to them and they never argue with me.

They are ridiculously comforting.

Last week a friend sent me an email that was quite kind, and it said I seem to see the world a little differently than most people.

That, of course, is just a nice way of putting me on some kind of spectrum.

Ridiculous?

Don’t ask me. I just live here.

Do you have something to add to this story, or something else we should report on? Email:mailto:andrea.demeer@similkameenspotlight.com


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Andrea DeMeer

About the Author: Andrea DeMeer

Andrea is the publisher of the Similkameen Spotlight.
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