Laura on Life

The Laws of Nature

I woke up this morning wondering what I was going to wear today. My only two pairs of pants with elastic waistbands were in the wash and I had put on a little too much poundage to comfortably wear any of the others.

Maybe today was a good day to start that diet and exercise program I keep putting off.

I padded to the kitchen in bare feet and my nightgown which still fit, thank heaven. I looked around for something healthy to eat. In the fruit bowl, there were a couple of spotted bananas, an apricot that had gone mooshy, and three Macintosh apples (not the kind that lay claim to computing abilities).

The bananas were edible, but unappetizing. The apricot was unacceptable; I tossed it in the trash. And the Macintoshes were too tart for so early in the morning. The last thing I needed first thing in the morning was to feel my face shrivel up.

There were cereals, of course, but the kind I keep in stock for my kids were not of the nuts-dried fruit-tree bark persuasion. They were mostly the stick-to-the-kitchen-floor-when-wet variety. I knew I couldn’t eat those if I was planning to lose weight.

I decided to skip breakfast.

Going for a brisk walk would have fit into my plan, but like I said, I hadn’t any clothes to wear. Walking sans clothes in my neighborhood would have attracted unwanted attention, briskly or not.

To forget about my hunger, I put a load of laundry in the washer, sat down, still in my nightgown, and began to do some writing. My mistake here was that I sat facing a window. You see, the birds and squirrels were still eating their breakfast.

Believe it or not, when you are hungry and you see a bird pulling a nice, fat, juicy worm out of the ground, even brown bananas start to sound appealing. I was actually jealous that the birds and squirrels seemed to be getting breakfast, but I, a human being, top of the food chain, was starving!

Do birds and squirrels ever go on a diet? Or exercise? No!

By the time I had downed my second bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, which was the healthiest cereal I could find – it has honey, right? – I had convinced myself that diet and exercise went against the laws of nature. And who am I to deny laws that had been written since the beginning of time? Honey having no calories being the exception.

For some reason, it was easy to ignore the fact that sitting at a computer or watching TV went against the natural order of things as well. Honey probably has that effect on people.

The next order of business was to determine what I was going to wear. Fortunately, it didn’t occur to me to compare my wardrobe with that of the natural world. My body, seen au naturel, would’ve terrified even the birds and squirrels.

After I had retrieved some clothes from the dryer and donned my best pair of elastic-waist pants, I decided a little retail therapy was in order. I was going clothes shopping! It was time to make the birds and squirrels jealous!

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Laura Snyder may be reached at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com

Or check her website www.lauraonlife.com for archived columns