Pertinent to my Interests

The start of summer has gotten me all nostalgic about the many summers that have come and gone in my life.

The summer that I was fifteen I worked at the local resort as a housekeeper. I had worked at a local pizza place previously and not enjoyed the intense customer service experience (especially when one customer was so angry she made me cry, but more on that later). Surely I, an introvert who enjoyed clean spaces, would do much better as a solitary, silent housekeeper.

There were three white people in the housekeeping department at this resort: the boss lady, me, and another girl my age who was married to a Mexican-American man. Everyone else was from Mexico; some very recently arrived, but many had lived in this town longer than my own family had. Spanish was the common language of our crew, and I was the odd one out with my meager ability to count to ten and name the colors. The other white girl my age was kind enough to translate for me and try to include me when she could despite our extremely different backgrounds and life situations (married at fifteen!!!).

Working as a housekeeper at the local resort was a good job, but it was a hard job too. They were understaffed and most of us worked six days a week all summer long. Every morning I would wake up, put my hair up in a bun and pull on my regulation resort polo and black pants. I would walk down the hill a mile into town. We would all receive our work assignments on clipboards in the morning, and take the master key for our particular hallway and building. Then we headed out.

I usually worked alone, which was how I preferred it. The boss lady and assistant boss lady would circulate with their walkie-talkies all day checking our progress which we all dutifully recorded on our clipboards.

My days that summer were defined by “make-ups” and “check-outs.” Make-ups were easy: wipe down the bathroom, replace towels and toiletries, make the beds, take out the garbage, vacuum. I could easily complete a make-up in fifteen minutes as long as the guests hadn’t trashed the place. The difficulty with make-ups was in the timing, and I became very adept at noticing when people were leaving so I could rush over and do their room immediately. Often I was assigned the same hallway all week and I would learn the habits of the guests and know which families were going to already be at the beach at 8 AM and who wasn’t going to leave their room until lunchtime.

I got tipped less than five times the entire time I worked at this resort, and I don’t know if this is a regional thing or what, but I was very surprised to learn that a lot of normal, middle-class people tip the hotel maid when they check out. They definitely weren’t tipping in my town! One time I went into a make-up with a kitchenette and found a twenty dollar bill along with a note asking me to do all the dishes. I was happy to oblige.

The resort had five big buildings full of hotel rooms and suites, but there were a few special buildings too. The resort owned an older building in town that had several apartments, all un-updated with beautiful wood floors and cabinetry and cool vintage kitchens. I cleaned those a few times and was delighted with the layers of age in those places. There was a big multi-story cabin in the center of the resort and I recall thinking that this cabin was the height of luxury, a rich person’s dream. I am pretty sure I could afford to stay there now and that blows my mind.

If a maid finished her hallway early she would then be assigned to help someone else who was still struggling to finish their hallway. It was in these afternoons when I was working with the other housekeepers that I finally started to learn some useful Spanish. My coworkers always turned the television to El Gordo y La Flaca when we were working, and the ones who knew enough English would translate the especially funny parts for me, teaching me new words along the way. I learned the word for clothes hanger in Spanish, and still remember that each room was supposed to have ocho ganchos in the closet. I vacuumed each rincon very thoroughly.

I don’t remember ever getting yelled at in this job. I think I had an advantage as a white teenage girl because when I knocked on a door and a very tired young mother “on vacation” answered to tell me to please come back later we could easily determine a better time for maid service together. All of my coworkers knew enough English to have the same conversation, but it was stilted and stressful for the white vacationers.

“One o’clock!” I would hear a white lady practically yelling at my coworker down the hall. “You understand? Uno! Uno o’clock is bueno!” The guests weren’t necessarily trying to be rude or mean, they just assumed the brown-skinned lady with the cart full of tiny shampoos didn’t understand a word of English.

I don’t mind cleaning, but cleaning up after other people can be its own special hell. Some guests were extremely messy, and navigating our big heavy vacuums around piles of clothes on the floor made make-ups more difficult than they needed to be. We never wanted to touch a guest’s items so we would very carefully push dirty clothes a few inches with our shoes and then do our best with the vacuum. Some guests totally ripped apart their beds and left wet towels in random places. A lot of people left garbage all over the room, and sometimes it was difficult to determine what was meant to be thrown away and what was being saved.

Overall, the housekeeping team worked well together. The boss lady wasn’t too good to jump in and help make a bed if we were hustling to finish a check-out in time, but there were some… issues. They did not give us toilet brushes to clean the inside of the toilet. I was taught on my first day to spray the inside of the bowl with the usual cleaning spray and then use my hand and a rag to wipe it, getting my bare hand down into the water if needed. I was horrified, and to this day I wonder how common a practice this is in hotels. If I didn’t want to do it, I was told, I could bring in my own toilet brush and carry it with me every day. I didn’t want to do that either, and somehow I managed to put my hand in toilet water only once that whole summer.

I got very efficient with hospital corners and I learned lots of neat tricks for making the bathroom look more clean. Even today I still wipe a little glass cleaner in my bathroom sink after cleaning it to give it that even shinier, cleaner look. I got a lot of practice with always going from top to bottom, cleanest to dirtiest, strategies I use almost every day in my current life. But I also learned that hotels almost never change out the comforter and that any glass cups in the room were probably just wiped down with glass cleaner and not actually cleaned before you showed up.

The summer ended on a sour note when I developed a terrible hacking cough that just wouldn’t go away. I went to the doctor, who was not surprised at my cough once she heard about my summer job.

“It’s that cleaning spray they use,” she explained. “We’ve seen a lot of the resort housekeepers here with the same thing.” My mother was horrified. She wrote a letter to management about their negligence in forcing the housekeepers to use these harsh chemicals, and she bought me a bottle of Soft Scrub so I wouldn’t have to use the harsh green spray. But I continued to use the spray (it was so efficient!) through the end of August at the resort.

I went back to high school in September with a solid start to my savings account and a hacking cough that did eventually go away. It had been a good job, a great learning experience on a lot of levels, and I’m glad I did it. I still think about those old apartments regularly, and that $20 bill I got for doing ten minutes of dishes.

I know you are all wondering: do I tip the maid when I stay at a hotel now? I do not. Having cleaned hundreds of rooms and been tipped so infrequently it still strikes me as odd to tip the maid. But I don’t let my kids scatter clothes all over, and I try to make it obvious that yesterday’s paper is supposed to go in the garbage.

And I try really hard to not touch the comforter. Ew.

I did not realize I was writing a three-part series until I arrived here at part three and the question which troubles me every day.

How busy should kids be?

No, wait, that’s not quite right.

How busy should I make my kids be?

My kids are mostly uninterested in extracurricular activities. They are currently both participating in piano lessons and swim lessons. They tolerate these activities, mostly. We’re really limping to the finish line on piano lessons here, and absolutely nobody was excited to perform in the piano recital last weekend. I sat in the audience and clapped for my kids when they bowed and even though I was proud and happy to be there I still wondered if it was really worth it to force them to do this.

We had an unusual experience recently in that my youngest found an activity he wanted to try, an obscure martial art that I hadn’t even heard of before, but we found a dojo and got him started in the spring. I have never had a kid sign himself up for something before, and it was so refreshing to have him excited to go to the practice sessions and proud to come home and show his brother what he had learned.

But all good things come to an end, and this particular good thing ended around the six-week mark.

“It’s just not for me!” he protested when we told him it was time to go to practice that week. “I tried it, and I decided I don’t like it! Don’t make me go!”

“You can’t quit on a bad day!” I told him. “Keep going for now and we can talk about this again next week!”

That line bought us one more good week of practice, but the next week I found myself sitting in my car in front of the dojo in a stalemate with my nine-year-old who refused to get out.

“I don’t even care if you take away screen time!” he insisted. “I’m done! I’m not going anymore! I don’t want to go! You can’t make me go!”

So what is the point of signing our kids up for extracurriculars they don’t want to do in the first place? The best-case scenario is that they just needed a little push to discover some new activity that will bring them joy and a sense of satisfaction in the years to come. The worst-case scenario is months of resentment for being forced to do an activity, and massive battles to get them to actually get their asses in the car and go to these activities every week.

A high risk, high reward proposition if there ever was one, and I am no ambitious entrepreneur. I’m just a mom who is still grieving the fact that they both quit chess club years ago and refuse to go back.

But I also try to remember that childhood is not forever, and adulthood is full of new opportunities. Sure, my youngest refuses to do Lego Robotics League now, but maybe in his 20s he’ll take up embroidery. Maybe it’ll be scuba diving or cross-country skiing. Maybe my oldest will write really great One Piece fanfic and make great fanfic friends and end up in long-term, weirdly fulfilling book club with them. We just don’t know what the future holds.

For now, their futures hold piano lessons. But I would be willing to give that up if it allowed them to find their true passion elsewhere, even if it’s embroidery.

My essay about piano lessons got me thinking about extracurricular activities.

I do not like to be busy. I never have. When I was a kid my favorite thing to do after a full day of school was to go home. So when my mom would gently encourage me to try some new activity or–even worse–force me to participate, I was rarely enthusiastic.

Here is a list of extracurricular activities in which I participated at some point before the age of eighteen: Campfire Boys & Girls, dance, gymnastics, t-ball, basketball, piano, volleyball, cross-country running, track & field, some math competition thing I can’t remember the name of, MedClub, theater, and a bunch of random church stuff like confirmation class and doing reading or ushering.

I only lasted a season for most of these, with some exceptions. I did Campfire all through elementary school (I think?). I believe we only met once a month and mostly did arts and crafts projects and I enjoyed that. I stuck with gymnastics until 3rd or 4th grade (?). But I never played a sport for more than one season.

I just dislike sports so much. I am extremely unathletic, but also unmotivated by the excitement of competition or team spirit (perhaps because I am so unathletic?). And the time commitment was ridiculous. Practice every day after school and we have stupid fucking away games where I’m stuck on a loud bus for hours? No thanks!

Theater worked well for me because there was a cycle to it. I was never cast in a lead role, so for the first couple weeks I would only have to show up for rehearsal once or twice after school. There was plenty of downtime backstage and I could quietly chat with my weird theater friends while also doing homework. As we got closer to showtime my practice schedule would ramp up until the last two weeks when we were all there every day after school for hours.

This would be my breaking point. I would backslide on piano practice, and major school projects would be ignored. I would be stressed out and spiraling a little bit by the time we rolled into the full weekend of shows.

And then it would be all over. We would strike the set on Sunday night, I would arrive at school exhausted on Monday morning and that afternoon I would do what I loved most: I would go home. Every afternoon. For weeks.

Most people are not like me. I think most people like to have a few obligations on the calendar to force them out of their homes. They maybe find the gym tedious and prefer to be on a soccer team. They derive satisfaction from coaching the local middle school debate team or seeing their friends at choir practice. I respect this about people!

A lot of people enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished something in their free time, but I enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished nothing.

No, I take that back. I enjoy the satisfaction of playing piano alone in my house for an hour. I enjoy finishing a really long non-fiction book about the Romanov dynasty. I enjoy mowing the lawn at the cabin and not using the self-propel feature even once. I enjoy watching the Marble Olympics with my kids before bedtime, and going out for drinks with the neighbors on the weekends.

I think my personality just doesn’t mix well with extracurriculars. This is a bad look on paper, particularly when it comes to college applications and resumes.

But you know what? If I had another chance to do high school again, I wouldn’t do it any differently. I’m glad so many extracurricular opportunities exist for kids, and I know so many people who have fond memories of all those away games, but I have no regrets about the many afternoon hours I spent on the couch watching old Star Trek episodes on VHS.

Part of my purpose in writing this blog is to leave something of myself behind for my kids to read when I’m gone. As such, there are going to be posts where I just go off reminiscing of the olden days.

Hold on to your butts.

When I was in first or second grade my grandparents hauled their old piano out of their house and delivered it to our basement. This piano was old enough to have ivory keys, but also old enough to be missing several pieces of the ivory keys. I’m not sure if it was ever tuned properly, and it was a beast, but this was my first piano.

My mom was my first piano teacher. We had a beginner book, we had a piano, but we did not have the right vibe. My mom is not a great teacher and I think we both quickly realized this was going to work much better if a professional teacher was acquired.

My next piano teacher was a real piano teacher, but she moved away after my first year of lessons. She was unremarkable, and I only remember that her son was in my class at school. I can’t even remember her name.

And then we get to my real piano teacher, that Ozymandias of my musical memory, Kathryn.

Kathryn was a talented musician who merely tolerated her young students and always used a purple pen to mark up the music. Her studio was in the family room of her house, and she had somehow managed to squeeze in two(!) baby grand pianos, several keyboards, and an entire wall of sheet music.

I still remember the dread of walking into that room on weeks when I had not practiced enough. My sister and I had lessons back-to-back and had a standing agreement that whoever had not practiced enough would get to go second, thus gaining an extra thirty minutes to work with the unpracticed material at the keyboard.

Sometimes neither of us had practiced enough, and those were bad weeks. We would argue about who would be first to disappoint Kathryn. Sometimes I lost the argument and then I would be the one to carefully take my seat on the piano bench, heart pounding. I would start in on the first measure thinking it was going to turn out okay and she wouldn’t notice, and then by the third measure I would have already missed two of the B flats and the rhythm would have fallen apart and Kathryn would be livid.

“Did you practice at all this week?” she would ask, even though she already knew the answer. She would huff for the rest of the lesson, as if I had personally offended both her and Sergei Rachmaninoff with my lack of practicing. My sister and I both got kicked out of lessons early at least once for not practicing enough.

Both of my siblings took piano lessons from Kathryn for years, and for a while my mother did too. This necessarily led to the Era of Two Pianos in our house. My mom found an awesome old upright in the classified ads and that piano still sits in the upstairs living room of her house. It’s not an attractive piano but it sounds amazing despite being tuned exactly twice in the thirty years she has had it. Four people taking piano lessons plus two pianos resulted in a constant parade of music and missed accidentals in our house for a while.

This was before the age of Musicnotes.com, so when choosing what songs to play we were dependent on both Kathryn’s library of sheet music and her limited interest in anything composed after 1965. At some point of mastery there was a fork in the road of sheet music and we had two choices for the coming years of piano: “classical” or “modern.” Modern was just a code word for jazz, it seemed, so I picked “classical” and that is how I developed a lifelong appreciation for Bach and a lifelong distaste for Bartok.

In my last year of middle school, Kathryn took a sabbatical. My mom managed to find yet another temporary piano teacher whose name I do not remember. This teacher worked in a little room attached to the local record store. She had a computer with cool composition programs on it. She gave us more freedom to pick out our own music, resulting in some interesting choices that year.

“Well, let’s hear what you’ve been playing,” Kathryn said that next September when we were back in her family room studio with the twin baby grands. I proudly placed my fingers on the keys and launched into a gorgeous arrangement of My Heart Will Go On from the hit movie Titanic. Kathryn just sighed heavily and closed her eyes as if praying for strength.

Kathryn insisted on memorization of your performance piece for the annual spring recital. There was nothing more shameful than walking up to the big grand piano at the front of the church in your nice clothes and bringing your music with you. I think I only failed to memorize twice in the eight years I played in her recitals. Memorization or not, I was always a nervous wreck about recitals, especially as I improved and my named dropped closer and closer to the end of the program every year. My heart would pound harder with every song leading to mine.

Kathryn was an amazing pianist herself, and really should have been a performer rather than a teacher but I suppose there aren’t many opportunities for profitable performance in my small hometown. I remember one time I watched her perform a piece that I knew pretty well; I was astonished to hear several mistakes! I mentioned this to my mom.

“Yes, but she just kept playing, right?” my mom asked. I agreed that Kathryn had kept playing as if nothing had happened. “That’s the trick,” my mom said knowingly.

I performed in a senior recital with two of my closest friends and we were great. I played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and Telemann’s Fantasia in D Minor, which is the only one of the three I failed to memorize. At the time I thought the Rachmaninoff was the height of my ability, but I’ve since decided that an emotionally tuned Clair de Lune requires a lot more skill than the pounding wide chords of the Rachmaninoff. I still play the Debussy from time to time when I want to challenge myself and feel melancholy at the same time.

I think about Kathryn a lot now because my kids are currently taking piano lessons and their teacher is basically the opposite of her. Their teacher seems to love teaching kids despite the many challenges. She finds fun songs for them to play, and will spend hours searching out a just-right arrangement of whatever weird video game song they have requested. My youngest is interested in composition, and she is happy to shift the piano primer book into the background and instead work with him on chord theory. Recitals are built to be fun, not stressful. Memorization is encouraged but very optional.

I love this gentle approach for my kids, and they have a great rapport with their teacher. But I don’t feel like I missed out in any way. I loved my teacher and I think she loved me despite my flawed practice record. I still own a bunch of sheet music marked up in her purple pen. And thanks to that purple pen I still never miss the high E flat in the eighteenth measure of Clair de Lune.

It’s May and change is in the air. The children are extra squirrely. I’ve had “teacher gifts” on the bottom of my to do list for weeks now. The calendar is full of recitals and graduations.

It’s almost the end of the school year, and as the unemployed parent I both eagerly anticipate and dread the end of the school year.

I used to be really good at having my kids home with me all the time. Even when they were toddlers and babies and they were always inventing new ways to hurt themselves and each other, I rocked the stay-at-home parenthood. We had some built-in routines but also flexibility. I had a running list in my head of potential outings and playdates. I knew what time all the nature centers opened, and which indoor play areas were most likely to keep my kids immersed for hours. I rotated toys like it was my job (I mean I guess it was my job).

I can’t tell if I’m just out of practice or still burned out from those early years of parenthood. I was good at it, but it was hard. Really hard.

Good Things About the Upcoming Summer Break:
1. No more prying my youngest out of bed with a crowbar at 6 AM.
2. No more homework! Even better: no more emotions about homework!
3. Flexible schedule for cabin time, hiking, going to the pool, etc.
4. Three months of not worrying about school shootings!

Bad Things About the Upcoming Summer Break:
1. I am in charge of my children’s entertainment and stimulation 100% of the time.

Now please know that I am a big proponent of boredom in childhood. Boredom is the seed of creativity! Boredom is what gives us space to explore our thoughts. Boredom is amazing!

But how much boredom is too much boredom? And at what point does healthy boredom become social isolation and a harmful lack of parental interest?

This was something I struggled with back when they were little and I was a stay-at-home mom. Yes, I did want them to experience boredom and not be dependent on me for stimulation, but if I had been working they would have been in daycare and constantly entertained by their classmates and the fun art project the teacher was leading. There were things they missed out on by not going to daycare, and I felt the pressure to make up for that by planning regular playdates and constant playground trips.

I think it worked out okay, and my kids are pretty good at self-entertaining, but not all day every day. Even animals in the zoo need stimulation, and my little nine- and eleven-year-old animals do need entertainment.

But maybe I’m overcomplicating things by assuming they need outings and playdates.

My favorite childhood summers were the summers of 1995, 1996, and 1997. My mom was sick of dealing with the bullshit of the high school students she used to hire as nannies every summer. My sister and I were not old enough to legally work yet, but we were old enough to stay home alone during the day. In the morning my mom would write our chores on the whiteboard in the kitchen, drop my little brother off at his cheap summer daycare, and my sister and I would get almost eight hours daily of the house to ourselves.

Those were fantastic summers. We listened to Jewel’s Pieces of You album over and over again while we did cartwheels in the living room and ate dry cocoa mix. We watched The Sound of Music every day one summer, and My Best Friend’s Wedding every day the next summer. I played with my gerbils in the sandbox. This was the summer that the kindly Jehovah’s Witnesses gave us a pamphlet about their religion and by the time my mom got home from work my sister and I had doctored it up into “The Monkey Bible.” We never left the house during the day. We loved it.

Maybe this summer I should bring back the Summer of 1995 for my own kids. Dry cocoa mix will be the only snack option. We’ll buy some gerbils and download the Pieces of You album. I’ll tell the kids they can have as much screen time as they want but the only screen time options are The Sound of Music and My Best Friend’s Wedding. I will teach them how to do cartwheels.

And if we’re lucky the Jehovah’s Witnesses will show up at least once.

But the reality is that I am not a single working mother. I am home all day, I don’t have a job. My kids missed out on daycare in their early years and now it feels like they’re missing out on the glory of the independent summer unencumbered by the presence of a responsible adult. I’m going to be here every day yelling at them about clothes left on the floor and doling out little doses of screen time. I’m going to make them eat apples for snack and go on long, annoying hikes.

Moms truly are the worst.

I gotta get a job.

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.