The older I get I find that my gut feeling is often wrong. It’s just plain wrong sometimes.
“How is the coffee?” says my spouse Janyce as she walks across the bedroom to deliver me a cup.
“I’m not loving it,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m not loving it either,” she says. “I think that your Whole Foods low acid was better.”
I’m sitting up in bed with my laptop on my knees, the sunlamp on full blast, and the curtains open. I look beyond the green leaves through an opening to my neighbor’s backyard lawn.
“What do you see, girl?” I say to the dog. “Is it him?”
I’ve been looking for Woodman all summer, last year’s fat and solitary woodchuck, who used to crawl out from under the sagging shed in the back yard. He’d inch his way out to lumber around on the weedy grass and feast on clover and tender crabgrass shoots. But just the other day I finally spied him out on our neighbor’s lawn. I felt strangely rooked and abandoned by a rodent that I had loved enough from afar to give him a name. Traitor.
Swirly is looking out the window from her spot at the end of the bed and twitching. Her dog ears are perked up. I grab my phone from beside me on the bed and snap a picture of her. Maybe it really is Woodman this morning. She’s been watching him in the afternoons from her spot in the front yard, tethered to a lead that gives her lots of mobility to explore, but not enough to reach the neighbor’s yard. If she could reach, she would catch him easily, and she knows this. She sits quietly and watches.
It’s 6:45 in the morning and here begins my dilemma. Do I continue to drink the low acid coffee that is organic? Or do I try to return it and go back to what I liked drinking? The non-organic, low-acid coffee that tastes great, even though coffee beans are the most heavily pesticide-laden crop there is — so I’m told by one of the nutritionists who is trying to help me. Do I know anyone at all who drinks organic coffee? The entire world is drinking regular coffee beans and nobody is dying from it.
This is the slippery slope I’m about to start sliding down, on my back, with my hands and feet flailing in the air the whole way and I’m not sure how long the descent is. This is the second guessing, contrariness stuff that I do all the time. The guy who is putting in a new patio for us is coming over for the fifth time to pick up the deposit. We had questions. Well, I had questions.
“He’s been in business for 25 years so why is there no logo on his truck or his estimate,” I said.
“I don’t think he’s trying to cheat us,” said Janyce. “These guys are busy doing the hard labor. They don’t think about marketing.”
“Yeah, but look, he left us a sample and I looked it up on the internet and it doesn’t match,” I said.
We both went back to look at the sample in the yard and then I pulled it up on the internet again. They looked nothing alike.
“Do you want to get another estimate, start all over?” said Janyce.
“No.” I said. “When I second guessed the paver style, he told me it is, in fact, the very same one. If you feel the surface, there is a texture. The website is misleading.”
“So we are okay? You want to move forward?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “He answered all my questions and amended the contract the way I wanted it, finally. So yes.”
The thing about a gut feeling is that I totally believe in them. You have to listen to them, right? That’s your inner voice trying to signal that something isn’t quite right. Except the older I get I find that my gut feeling is often wrong. It’s just plain wrong sometimes. And absolutely everything you can swear by as real can also be disputed somewhere. Janyce usually takes a lot longer to make a decision on something but she is naturally less judgmental than I am. I am impulsive right away but then I wonder if maybe I didn’t do enough checking. Maybe there is something else I missed? Maybe I’m just wrong about something I thought I was so right about?
I look over at Swirly who has since jumped off the bed, gone out for her walk with Janyce, and returned to sleep beside me. Even my dog doesn’t know quite what to believe sometimes. She has days when it takes her a long time to approach the bowl of food we set down on her mat for her. Because she is a rescue dog, we make guesses about her strange behavior, and we tell ourselves stories about why she acts the way she does. But maybe it’s simply that she is taking it day by day, deciding whether she can trust her gut or not. Like we all are.