Once in a while you’ve got to kvetch. Whine and complain. Every now and then you need to stomp your feet. Yell “It isn’t fair” because it isn’t. Forget the phony smiles, the I’m OK looks when you’re really not. Sometimes you just have to say what’s on your mind even if it isn’t pretty. Sometimes it just isn’t pretty.

Today was that day.

You always know. There are days when you shouldn’t get out of bed. “Turn right around,” you say to yourself. “Pull up the covers and hunker down. Better to stay right here and wait it out.” You should, but you don’t.

Instead, you get up. You put on your green Concord High sweat pants you got from the Principal, a gift from the lost and found. You pad to the kitchen, tripping over a trail of dirty socks that lead, like breadcrumbs, to the laundry room. On any other day you might stoop down to pick them up, but not today. You leave them, right where they are, just in case a certain someone has lost their way.

There are piles of clothes in the laundry room. Clean, dirty and some in between. You fill the washer with a colored load only to find the clothes you washed just a few days ago still folded at the bottom of the barrel. You grumble, loudly.

You pull out the cold cuts to make the kids’ lunches knowing full well you may find them several days from now, untouched and moldy in their bedroom closet. You grumble again and make them anyway.

There is no milk. The butter is frozen. An egg falls on the floor spewing yellow everywhere. The dogs need to be fed. There are papers to grade, bills to pay, taxes to finish.

Some days are like that.

The ice cream in the freezer is soupy. So are the sausages and the tater tots and the fish sticks. Yesterday it was soft and you wondered why. Today you know. It can only mean one thing.

You order a washer and dryer for your mother in Florida. “Is there anything else?” the sunny voice says on the other end of the line and just for a moment you consider a stainless steel refrigerator with the freezer on the bottom, but only for a moment. You hang up and then you grumble.

Your neighbors are going to Disney World, your best friend to Paris. The bedroom is calling your name.

At the dinner table the family gathers. They hold hands and give thanks for something, anything that they are grateful for. There is the food, of course, and the weather, the grade on the Algebra test and a good baseball practice. You pause for a moment, wondering what you might say. What are you grateful for?

So you make a list.

Yes, some days are like that. Tomorrow, thankfully, is another day.