Pertinent to my Interests

We’ve been up at our cabin the last two weekends working to get ready for the summer. We planted a bunch of new trees this year. We got out the kayaks, launched the jet ski, mowed the lawn, and did some beaver-proofing on our favorite trees. I removed four wheelbarrow loads of muck and weeds from the lake.

There are many downsides to owning a cabin, the obvious one being that we have an entire second home and property to maintain along with our primary house. And we’re dealing with new things that ten years of owning a home in a city didn’t prepare us for: well pumps and septic systems and docks and lake weed. When we’re at the cabin I worry about the house, and when we’re home I worry about the cabin.

One of the most unexpected benefits of the cabin is the change of scenery and change of pace.

Maybe this isn’t a surprise to the rest of you, but it was to me. I’m a homebody. I like not leaving my house and I like not leaving my neighborhood and I like not leaving my city. There’s a reason my family hasn’t done a ton of traveling, and that’s because I’m not a good traveler and I dislike planning trips. Why would we leave our house?! All of my favorite stuff and my favorite cheese and my cats and my books are at my house!

The cabin, it turns out, is the best of both worlds. It’s like traveling without the travel. I already have a toothbrush at the cabin, and my favorite Brandi Carlile sweatshirt and I know where we keep the silverware.

So packing is easy. Getting there is easy.

Being there is easy and comfortable in a way I didn’t think it would be.

I sit on the porch in the morning drinking my coffee and waiting for a visit from our neighborhood beaver. We try to keep device use to a minimum at the cabin, which means we play more board games and card games. When we sit around the fire in the evenings we look at each other instead of at our phone screens. The kids get one pop per day at the cabin as a special treat. If we stay up late enough we can see the Milky Way.

Honestly, sometimes it’s a little too much family time. And there are always chores and projects to be done. The bathroom at the cabin has to be cleaned too, you know. One winter the boiler failed spectacularly causing major damage.

So the cabin is not a vacation, and it can be stressful, but somehow it still feels refreshing to have gone to the cabin. It’s a very small departure from our every day, even with the small stresses that come with traveling on the weekends.

A little change is good.

I was embarrassingly old when I found out that you could request alterations to your meal at any restaurant.

Like… really embarrassingly old. I’m talking post-college.

Yeah.

But what am I supposed to think if Burger King is going to use the tag line “Have it your way!” in their advertising? If it’s special that you can “have it your way” at Burger King, doesn’t that imply that you can’t have it your way at other restaurants?

One of the reasons I didn’t realize this until late in life is that I come from a family that never asks for alterations. Really! Every single one of us will go around the table and just order what’s on the menu. My husband’s family–on the other hand–always has a question to ask or an alteration to request. Are there mushrooms in the soup? Serve the sauce on the side, please. No pickles. Extra mayo. The difference in our family cultures in this regard is comical to me.

I was late to the game realizing I could make changes to my food orders, but I was also late to the game realizing I could even state my opinions about food.

It was 1995. My mom’s boyfriend and his son (or as I like to refer to him, my temporary stepbrother) were at our house for dinner. There was sourdough bread on my temporary stepbrother’s plate and he said “Oh, I don’t really like sourdough.” And then he didn’t eat it.

My mind was blown. It had not occurred to me until that moment that a person could state their negative feelings about food at the table and then refuse to eat that food.

I don’t know why, but I tended to eat whatever I was served. Was it my mom’s opposition to keeping good snacks around? Or was I just a particularly hungry child? I don’t know, but I remember sighing and finishing my bowl of split pea soup even though I would rather eat grass from the yard. I hollowed out a lot of stuffed peppers in my day, leaving a trail of sad bell pepper skins behind me. I still think I don’t like rice.

It pains me as an adult to relate these childhood complaints because having someone else cook for me seems like such a wonderful luxury now!

Anyway, like I said, I was a hungry child, so I don’t think I actually stopped eating anything after I had this realization. And I still don’t alter my food orders at restaurants even though I know I can.

“As it comes?” my husband will ask for clarification if he’s putting in an online order.

“Of course, as it comes!” I always say.

But someone still needs to explain to me how “have it your way” makes sense for Burger King’s branding if you can actually have it your way anywhere!

1. Fall
   Most of fall is fleece weather! Summer is over, and we are back to a routine with the kids in school. The sun is going down at a civilized time. After months of everything being !!bright and happy!! all the time!! we are finally reminded that everything ends and that everyone we love will someday be as dead as the annuals I forced myself to plant in May when I was pretending to like gardening. The trees are gorgeous colors one day and then wistful bare branches the next. We have Halloween, my favorite holiday! We have Thanksgiving which is just a lazy four-day weekend and does not require any gift purchasing! You cannot have light without darkness, and this entire season of barreling toward the darkness is poignant and beautiful to me.
2. Winter
   You have to be hardy to survive winter here. I like it when nature is trying to kill me every time I go outside. I love the dark afternoons. I get out candles and I put up fairy lights in the house and everything glows. You have to make your own light and your own heat in the winter, and this appeals to me. We pile blankets on the couches for both humans and cats, and there is no pressure to go outside after 4 PM. This is puzzle season for me. I play the piano and read a lot in the winter and never fret about the house getting too hot if I turn on the oven. Fresh snow makes the outside world bright and quiet and perfect. There is no yardwork, only shoveling. And sledding. And building snowmen and snow forts.
3. Summer
   My feelings about summer have changed a lot ever since we bought our cabin. Now that I have regular lake access, I find summer much more tolerable. Summers when we lived in New York City were absolutely awful; walking down the stairs into the subway stations was like descending into hell. There was nowhere to swim. I was working full-time back then so still had to put on dress pants and a blouse every day and then sweat my ass off waiting for the N train. I cannot handle humidity despite more than a decade of living in humid places. But summer means swimming and swimming is my favorite thing. Summer means campfires and open windows in the morning. Summer means flexible schedules and my kids at home. And at some point every summer we get fresh peaches, so I will tolerate summer.
4. Spring
   Muddy. Grey. Muddy. Wet. Muddy. I do not like spring at all. The snow starts to melt and everything looks like shit. The snow finishes melting and everything looks like shit. Plants and flowers start to struggle back to life and everything still looks like shit for a couple weeks. Then you have to clean up your yard and try to keep some plants alive. If you’re a woman you have to pretend you enjoy gardening and smile and say thank you when someone gets you a potted plant for Mother’s Day. We go to the cabin and the water looks so inviting but it’s only 56 degrees and that is too cold even for someone like me who is built like a harp seal. We have to set our clocks forward and it takes almost two full weeks for my body to adjust. I’m not sweating now but I will be soon. And did I mention it’s muddy? Spring is the worst.

Last Thursday my youngest kid woke up and croaked out the words that I dread hearing from him because he’s always correct in his diagnosis: “I think I have strep.” Off we went to his favorite urgent care location and favorite pharmacy (you would have a favorite urgent care and pharmacy too if you got strep as often as he does).

The next day was Friday, and luckily the amoxicillin had kicked in and he was well enough to go to school. I happened to have my annual physical that day, something I had been dreading for many reasons but ended up going well.

On Monday morning I woke up with a rash on my arms and legs, and swollen, painful joints all over my body. I was alarmed, especially since I had just had a mysterious high fever and no other symptoms about a week before this. I’m not the kind of person who runs off to urgent care at the first sign of illness, but this was weird enough I felt an urgent care visit was warranted and that is how I ended up spending three hours at urgent care on Monday morning and then walking away without any real diagnosis.

My youngest kid had an appointment with the ear, nose & throat surgeon on Monday as well, after school. That doctor was running behind, and we ended up spending more than two hours at the specialty clinic.

And I have to go back today to follow up with my primary care doctor about my ongoing joint pain and rash!

This is why old people are tired all the time. It is exhausting to spend so much time at the doctor’s office. Waiting for the nurse, waiting for the doctor, waiting for the lab. I have great sympathy for those with chronic conditions who have to spend so much time managing their healthcare.

Anyway, having what basically amounts to arthritis in most of my joints this week has been an interesting experiment in getting old. Who knew that buttons could pose such a challenge? Squeezing out a washcloth is both difficult and painful.

Even more disturbing, my husband asked if I wanted him to come along to the appointment today. How sick does he think I am?! I have definitely not reached the “needs a companion at every appointment” stage yet, and don’t intend to for a long time, even if this is the beginning of something chronic (I don’t think it is).

On the positive side: every single medical assistant, patient registration specialist, nurse, doctor, surgeon, and phlebotomist that we have interacted with in the past week has been stellar.

When I was little, I accidentally dropped a small, plastic dinosaur out the back window of my dad’s 1987 Ford Ranger.

I was five years old and had been pretending that the dinosaur was running quickly through the woods, holding him up against the open pop-out window as we sped through the Cascade Mountains. My sister and I had a lot of plastic dinosaurs back then, most of them too big to fall through the crack, but this guy was a tiny ankylosaurus made of soft glow-in-the dark plastic. My fingers twitched the wrong way and suddenly he was gone.

I was frozen. Should I alert my parents and ask them to turn around and search for him? Would they agree to that? Would we even be able to find him on the side of the highway in the heart of the Cascade Mountains? Would they be mad? Would my sister be mad when she found out?

I didn’t say anything, but I still think about this incident regularly. It was the first time I remember realizing that disaster can happen in an instant. One moment he was safe in my hand and the next moment he was gone forever.

Maybe it’s silly to assign such weight to that moment. “Accidentally dropped a beloved plastic dinosaur out the window of a car” is not on the childhood trauma questionnaire. But I was five; I loved my plastic dinosaurs and I had not yet experienced the finality of death, which is the real before-and-after moment in a person’s life.

Is that little plastic ankylosaurus still out there somewhere, sun-bleached and brittle from all those years on the side of the road? Is he destroyed or smushed? Did a stranger find him while cleaning the highway, and did this stranger pause and wonder how this little guy ended up out in the middle of nowhere before she thrust him into the trash bag?

I wish objects had the power to tell their stories.

And if my sister is reading this: I’m sorry I lost one of our plastic dinosaur friends 35 years ago!

I started working retail in 2001, back when I was still in high school. I was at this little shop in my small hometown that sold patio furniture and pool chemicals and swimming toys and all sorts of junk that nobody needs.

There was no computer when I started. We were still using those little carbon copy slips to write out purchases. We calculated the tax with a calculator! Even more mind-boggling: we didn’t have a credit card machine. We had to set the credit card in this crazy little contraption and slide a mechanism over it to make an imprint and then have the customer sign the imprinted slip. It was bonkers.

We did get a computer system the next summer, and a real credit card machine that used the telephone line to dial out. Things went much faster once we could scan items, and I had a lot of fun entering inventory into the database and printing out new stickers whenever we got another box of junk.

That was a great job. I had a great boss who was good at managing the business and respected all the employees. I had an alcoholic coworker who showed up on time every morning, was super sarcastic and funny, and would take regular smoke breaks and report back to me on whatever obnoxious tourist bullshit was happening on the sidewalk. I had another coworker who taught me how to swear effectively in Spanish, and another who introduced me to modern country music.

One time I was standing at the cash register and a little girl approached the counter with tears in her eyes and a broken item in her hands. She explained, with her parents standing silently behind her, that she had been messing around and had accidentally broken the glass lawn ornament. Ashamed, she said she would like to pay for the broken item. I told took the two glass pieces from her and told her she was very brave for coming forward and admitting her mistake; because she had been so brave and honest we would not be charging her for the item.

See, when you work in a small business in a small town you can make decisions like this. (But I have no doubt my boss would have made the same call.)

Another time I was working with my younger, smaller, less-white coworker, when a man came in with his two daughters. The girls picked out a squirt gun, but when my coworker rang it up and the total was about $3 more than what was listed on the sticker. Clearly an inventory error and as I made my way to the front counter to correct it the man started berating my coworker.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, just that he called her stupid several times and there were some bad words thrown in there too.

I had been intending to override the cash register and honor the lower price on the sticker (obviously), but the man’s behavior had caused adrenaline to flood my system and by the time I got there I had decided on a different response.

“Hi, I’m the manager on duty,” I said. “You need to leave the store.”

This only pissed him off more and he started directing his vitriol at me, screaming about how he was just here to buy a squirt gun for his kids and I had no right to kick him out. More swearing. I wondered how often he behaved like this in front of his daughters.

“No, we don’t allow customers to treat us like this,” I said. “You really need to leave before I feel like I have to call the cops.”

The man left, angrily ranting the whole way.

This is the proudest moment of my entire life, and I talk about it regularly.

One of the most infuriating things about the job was how customers would let their kids just run rampant around the store. Bored kids would rearrange our shelves and their parents wouldn’t make them fix it. Hyperactive kids would dash around the patio furniture knocking over things. We constantly found broken items around the store.

I’m a parent now, so I understand being on vacation and wanting to do some shopping and just wanting the kids to keep themselves entertained for a couple minutes so you can pick out new sunglasses. But also as a parent, I have to ask: what the actual fuck. Do not let your kids make a massive mess for someone else to clean up, even if that someone else is a small-town minimum-wage employee.

This is why I was so impressed by the parents of the girl who tried to pay for the broken item. I worked at that store for five summers and that was the only time anyone offered to pay for a broken item.

Why was I thinking about all this? Well, the other day I was leaving the house without my purse. I tucked my keys into one pocket and my credit card and my ID into the other pocket. But why my ID? I wasn’t going to the liquor store and it has been a decade since I’ve been carded anyway. I never use my ID, but I always bring it with me if I’m bringing my credit card too.

Do you guys remember back in the 90s when everyone was writing “Check ID” in the signature area on their credit cards? Do you remember that we used to hand our credit cards over to the retail staff and they would actually check to make sure the signature on the slip matched the signature on the card? Or at least they were supposed to?

I remember that. I especially remember people being absolutely pissed when I would see “Check ID” written in their signature area and I would ask to see their ID. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. You only want people to check the ID when it’s a thief using your credit card. My bad.

One time I asked to see a guy’s ID and he said, “it’s in the boat.” I looked at his soggy shirt, squeaky water shoes, pink face, and windblown hair and thought that was probably true. I let the charge go through.

I don’t write “Check ID” on my credit cards, but it wouldn’t even matter if I did because nobody actually hands their credit card to a clerk anymore. I don’t even sign my credit cards. And yet there I was almost 25 years ago taking imprints of credit cards on carbon paper and checking identification like a goddamn fool.

For some reason this was my big lesson from this job: always carry your credit card and your ID together. Don’t leave your ID on the boat.

Also, don’t be an asshole to my coworker because I will kick you out of the store and then tell everyone about it for the rest of my life.

I was with a friend and some acquaintances at the playground the other day, and my friend was mentioning that her sister had just chaperoned the French Club trip.

“Oh, where did they go?” I asked.

“Uh, to France,” one of my acquaintances chimed in with an amused tone that signaled the absurdity of my question. Where else would the French Club go?

Well, my high school didn’t have trips to France. We had field trips to fish hatcheries and the Pacific Science Center, and our big 8th grade trip was an overnight to Long Beach. I asked where the French Club had traveled because in my mind it was absurd to assume that they had gone to France. Who takes groups of high schoolers to France?

Later that weekend I was at an open house with my husband, looking at real estate in our neighborhood.

“Oh, is this the pantry?” I asked as I approached a big set of cabinet doors.

“No, that’s the refrigerator,” the realtor responded with eyebrows slightly raised. His tone let me know that he had now written me off as a potential buyer. How can someone who can’t even recognize a high-end refrigerator clad in cabinetry afford this nice home?

It’s weird living my adult life in a new location and new tax bracket. To some extent, I will always be a stranger in a strange land who can never quite master the cues of my foreign home.

Maybe my kids will go on a school trip to France. Maybe someday I will abandon my $10 cat earrings for something with large diamonds and the realtors will start offering me champagne and great interest rates.

I think deep down I’ll always be wowed by rich people refrigerators and high school trips to Europe.