Trouble: now you see it, now you don't

OPINION: It's everything when it's there, all over you like a big dog. And it's nothing when you don't see it, writes Pat Veltkamp Smith in this week's And Another Thing.

Trouble, I mean, like a single tissue undetected that shreds and flakes over everything in the wash; or that raft of tiny moths that lies around dead of a morning, their little wings folded as if in prayer after a night flitting to touch a cheek or a hand or, surprisingly, a foot, which on a hot night kicks off the duvet and attracts that light touch.

They aren't obvious like those big batty, powdery moths that bang around lights, and you and me too.

No, these are so little you don't notice them until the lights are out, or maybe not even then.

Only in the morning do you see them flaked out on window sills or in the bottom of the bath and realise they've been with you all night and you hardly knew.

Clean them up in the morning. Take care to close windows and curtains before turning on lights at night. Do all that and still they'll turn up, uninvited, unwelcome. Trouble.

We know to check pockets for tissues and can blame only ourselves when jeans and dark shirts come out snow-sprayed.

But you can wash a heap of big towels and find tiny tissue bits embedded in their fluffiness and nary a pocket in sight.

Don't know.

Some days trouble just comes like weeds waiting to be plucked or drifts of autumn leaves that aren't but ought to be left, a reminder of the world changing, renewing itself.

Our bedroom window is a picture in autumn. A hundred leaves pressed scarlet against the glass.

But already 15 leaves are decidedly pink – on the turn, as we say – and we are only four days into this new season, which might be coming on us PDQ – "going forward" – as we also say, and rather a lot.

For someone normally more into the built than the natural environment, I am taking a lot of note – of weeds, which look contented enough but others say are aching to be plucked and couldn't someone do it, good by stealth as it were, in passing.

I like that saying "never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you".

Sometimes saying it to myself as a reminder, I sense the bewilderment of another inadvertently catching a line and thinking it a mad Macbeth witch chant.

Trouble is everything, and nothing.

It passes like grass; our junk endures.

» Pat Veltkamp Smith was Southland Times women's editor until 1997 and is a former president of the Southland Justices of the Peace Association.

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