Pertinent to my Interests

I am still luxuriating in all the space we suddenly have here in this new house.

Do you know how many times I used to have to clear the dining room table at our last house? When the kids were home full-time I remember clearing art projects in the morning for lunch, and then clearing art projects again right before dinner.

Do you know what I have now? I have two tables. Two. Separate. Tables. Right now there is nothing on the kitchen table, and the dining room table has my grandmother’s flatware–which I recently inherited–laid out for organization. And a chess board.

The chess board has been set up for a couple weeks now and we’ve actually been playing chess much more regularly because of it.

My dad taught me how to play chess when I was little and I always enjoyed it. His chess pieces lived in one of those weird cookie tins that everyone seemed to have in the 90s. We also had a little electronic chess game: it was a physical chess board with little moveable pieces. You had to press the square the piece started on and then the square where the piece was going to show the computer your move. The squares had little red lights on them and the computer would light the square under the piece it wanted to move and then light up the square the piece was moving to. I played with that thing a lot.

I never beat the computer, and I never beat my dad.

I also never beat my husband until last week when I chased him all the way through the endgame and into checkmate. I was so proud of myself.

One of my main hopes for my children was that at least one of them would be a chess prodigy. This has not happened. Also neither of them is a piano prodigy and I don’t know what the point of kids is if they can’t fulfill all my own unfulfilled goals.

It’s lovely to be able to keep the chess board out and ready to go and I hope we keep this up.

For most of my life, home was my mom’s house in my hometown. We moved there right after I turned four. My sister and I spent the next several years building elaborate My Little Pony villages in the basement playroom. I spent hours on my pogo stick in the driveway where my dad parked until my parents divorced and he moved out and nobody parked there. Eight years later I parked my own car in that driveway and would wake up extra early on winter mornings to shovel myself out. First the television was upstairs, then it was downstairs. First my mom’s bedroom was downstairs, then it was upstairs. I lived through the before and after of both badly-needed bathroom renovations.

After I moved away to college, home was still home. It’s not like my cinder block dorm room was every really going to be home. I remember flying back for Christmas getting excited as we would drive over the last hill and down into the valley and I would see the lake again for the first time in months. I would walk through the front door into the kitchen and release a psychic sigh.

I am home.

You know where this is going. That feeling of home started gradually shifting, I think sometime during the second half of our time in New York City. Not that New York City was home either–I never quite settled in there. But our little apartment felt like home in some ways that my family home no longer did. A weird liminal time. And at some point after that my mom’s house became not home, just a place I visited.

We have not yet been in this new house two months and already it is feeling like home. Not completely. We’re still missing a LOT of furniture and desperately need to hang some things on the walls and I still have three boxes of books sitting in the living room waiting for a bookshelf to magically appear. But it feels like home.

I am even starting to love the exterior of this house. I’ll be honest: I fell in love with the interior and was willing to accept the exterior. But now I walk up the steps to the front door and feel a great fondness for the weird look and the less-than-functional mailbox and the overgrown bushes.

I don’t wake up confused about which house I’m in anymore. I drive by my old house on my way to work and feel a twinge of sentimental curiosity, but not the ravaging grief that I had expected.

I’m disturbed by how quickly I’ve switched allegiances this time. It took years of unraveling for my mom’s house to no longer feel like home. This took less than two months. And I was OBSESSED with my old house. I mean come on, I met all the previous owners and wrote a freaking history book about it. I loved every corner of that house. I have given a great deal of thought to exactly which part of that house I’m going to haunt when I die.*

And yet, here I am lovingly running my fingers across the brick on this new house. Getting excited every time I go up the narrow attic stairs. Drinking my coffee and admiring the way the old glass in the French windows changes the shape of the world outside.

I remember about a year ago when we were just starting to take the house hunt seriously and I told a friend of mine how distraught I was at the thought of leaving our old house which we loved. They had done the same thing, selling a too-small home and buying a new just-right home years before us. She too had loved her too-small home. How did she manage to make the leap?

“I did love that house,” she told me. “And now I love this house.”

And that’s it, a disturbing reality. You can love one thing and then your love comes to a natural conclusion, and you start loving another thing. As someone who is happily married and in it for the long haul, I find this entire concept disturbing. If I can stop loving my old house, can I stop loving my husband too? My kids? My stupid-ass cats?

But the story underneath the reality is different. I spent probably a full year gently, intentionally untangling myself emotionally from our old house. Moving on from my mom’s house took at least seven years, and was a very natural milestone on the way to adulthood. I would have to try very hard and tell myself lots of fake stories about how terrible they all are in order to fall out of love with my husband or my kids or my stupid-ass cats (although the cats are admittedly quite terrible).

This reminds me of another quote from another friend that I think about a lot. She works with elderly people in the hospital.

“The biggest mistake that people make as they age is being too attached to their living situation,” she told me. And that has stuck with me. So in twenty or thirty years when it’s time to make a change and move on from this house I hope I can remember that my heart’s home has changed before, several times, and I can change it again. But only if I want to.

*Probably the kitchen, but it would also be awesome to be a ghost woman playing a ghost piano in the living room so I’m considering that as well.

I feel like I am moving in slow motion when it comes to house projects.

An example. One of the things that most excited us about the new house was the finished attic space. There is a legitimate bedroom up there, and right next to it there’s a funky, finished room with a skylight. We knew immediately that this second attic room would be the new Lego room.

My oldest had an elaborate Minecraft Lego world displayed on an old coffee table in the basement of the old house. He’s been wanting to expand it for years, and now that we have the space I told him I would get him a nice low activity table–the kind that teachers have in their classrooms–so he could continue to build out his little masterpiece.

At the beginning of August, right after we moved in, I started hunting for an activity table to become the new Lego table. Turns out they’re very expensive, so I spent some time searching on Facebook Marketplace, and even asked the custodian at my school if he had anything in storage I could bring home. I struck out in both these arenas.

I finally put in an order to Lakeshore Learning on September 2. It was delivered on September 9.

Now, I am absolutely the type of wife who will not wait for her husband to help her lift the heavy stuff. In fact, I am the kind of wife who will ask for help but then just go do it myself if it turns out I have to wait more than five minutes for his assistance. However, I make an exception for six-foot-long tables that weigh eighty pounds. That is not something I could safely push up two twisty flights of stairs by myself.

So the table sat in the box in our living room until this past weekend, when we finally carried it upstairs. I rearranged the Lego room to make space for this new centerpiece, but then had to turn my attention to all the other regular Sunday afternoon tasks that must be completed before the week starts.

Yesterday was Wednesday and I finally climbed the attic stairs again, this time with mallet and screwdriver in hand, to attach the table legs and finally shove it into its place of honor, ready for Legos.

I installed three table legs. One of the legs they sent is bent in a way that makes it impossible to install.

So now I have to go back and contact customer service and wait for the new piece. I’ve been working on this project since the first week in August, and here we are almost seven weeks later and I’m still working on it.

A similar issue is the ice maker and water dispenser on this refrigerator. We have never been rich people who enjoy water dispensed from a fridge, so we were pretty excited about it, but when we turned on the water about a week before we moved, we discovered that water was spilling out onto the kitchen floor and into the laundry room below, rather than into the glass hopefully pressed against the dispenser button.

Okay, fine. Put it on the list for the plumber. We had a couple other small plumbing issues that needed to be addressed anyway, and after letting the list build up for a couple weeks I finally called and got on the plumber’s schedule.

The plumber came last week to get a start on the list. He worked on the valve below the fridge, told me to keep an eye on it for a week and see if it was still wet. He came back yesterday and replaced the valve (yes, it was still leaking) and the water line to the fridge which was also leaking.

We turned on the water, attempted to dispense water and… water is still coming out the bottom of the refrigerator. (At least it’s not leaking in the laundry room anymore!)

So now I have to call the appliance guy. I have a great appliance guy, but it’s always a week or two before he can come out, he diagnoses the problem, and then it’s another week or two waiting for parts before he returns to triumphantly fix the problem.

Meanwhile, my oldest has been dutifully filling an emptying the ice cube trays daily. He’s the only reason anyone has ice around here because God knows I’m never going to fill an ice tray. I prefer my water tepid, never use ice, and have reached the point in my life where I am creating a lengthy list of household tasks that I refuse to do. (Replacing Kleenex boxes is also on this list. Why was this even my job in the first place? The person who uses the last tissue should be the one to replace the box.)

I am feeling a little defeated about a lot of little things lately, and this is definitely adding to my mental miasma. But really, it’s okay if we don’t have a Lego table until October and a working ice maker until November. Right? RIGHT?

I started piano lessons this week. I’ve been wanting to get back to lessons for several years but have hesitated for various reasons. One reason is that for the past several years I’ve also been applying for jobs, and it’s hard to commit to lessons when you have no idea what your life is going to look like in a month.

But if I’m being honest, the main reason I avoided going back to lessons for so long is that I felt I didn’t deserve to spend $175 on my silly little hobby every month when I didn’t even have a real job.

I know that’s a dumb way to approach one’s life.

My first lesson wasn’t really a lesson–more of a “getting to know you while one of us sits at the piano and plays some old pieces” sort of thing. My teacher is the same one who used to teach my kids. She’s wonderful, and patient, and we’ve known each other for years now, but the parent/teacher relationship is very different from the student/teacher relationship, so we have to work that out together.

“I didn’t know you were so advanced!” she said to me. “And you play so beautifully with so much feeling.” All those years of piano, and I can only think of one other moment that made me shine with pride like those words did.

Now I just have to live up to her higher expectations by actually practicing!

We sold our old house this week. I drove by it on the way to work on Thursday morning–staring at the orange door, knowing it was no longer mine to unlock.

I know that house will start showing up in my dreams soon. And it will probably make me dream-cry. Does anyone else cry in their dreams? I cry in my dreams sometimes and it’s this desperate, howling cry because my dream self is messy and doesn’t know how to shove her emotions back down inside.

I dream about my dad’s house sometimes–that one doesn’t make me cry. We sold it after he died, and I was happy to see it go. I drive by it sometimes when I’m visiting my hometown and feel only a sense of satisfaction that someone else is in there now and I never have to walk through that door again. That house could be an entire blog post on its own. I’ll summarize it for now by saying that all the good years with my dad were in other homes, and most of my good memories of him take place around a campfire or on a boat.

I dream about my grandparents’ house a lot too. The house that I still think of as “the new house” as opposed to “the old house” where they lived for forty years and my mother grew up. I remember the old house but apparently have no emotional attachment to it; I can’t recall a single dream I’ve had about it. I could draw you a floorplan of the old house but wouldn’t have many memories to affix to any rooms.

But their new house is full of stories and memories. The pull-out couch in the sewing room where my sister and I always slept, and the strange selection of Christian books that I didn’t even realize were Christian until years later when I had read them all seven times. The tiny shower in the guest room always well-stocked with Pert Plus and vintage towels. The hallway closet that had games and puzzles in it but the one you were looking for was never there for some reason. And my grandparents, always sitting at the table in the dining room with their newspapers spread out around them.

I could go on about that house for an entire blog post too. And the fields around it, and the driveway, and the garage. Even the drawers in that kitchen are stuffed full of memories for me. So when I do dream about that house I tend to get overwhelmed. I wander around weeping, especially when I round the corner of the living room to search for them in the dining room and all I can find is a small stack of yesterday’s newspaper and a deck of cards. And then the dream starts to fade and I grasp at it thinking if I could just stay a little longer…

Place ties me to memory, whether I like it or not. Here I am visiting my grandparents in 2012, sitting in the same spot on the uncomfortable couch and looking at the same issue of Reminisce magazine from 1995 that I have read probably ten times now. No time has passed, and my childhood plays out forever right here in this living room in the Yakima Valley.

But what does that mean when I won’t ever see that couch again, or that issue of Reminisce magazine? I used to be able to reach out and touch the past, or at least graze it with my fingertips. Now there’s nothing left to touch.

My emotions around selling our first home haven’t settled into place yet, but I am predicting the weepy kind of dreams. Some of the best and worst years of my life happened in that house. I am not exaggerating when I say that every floorboard and doorknob and lightbulb in that house has a memory attached to it. A lot of those memories are going to fade away now.

The day before we closed the sale I stood in the front yard and looked up. The branches of the river birch are touching the window in the little bedroom again. We had them trimmed about ten years ago, and they are due for another trim. I used to sit inside, in the glider by that window, trying to get my oldest to sleep when he was baby, staring at the leaves pressed against the window while I hummed Peace Like a River over and over and over again. I had forgotten, until I saw those leaves on the window again. Someone else will have them trimmed now.

And I will forget over and over and over again.

Despite having very confidently typed out that title, I would not characterize the last several weeks as calm.

I spent this morning wading through someone else’s junk. We had told the sellers of our new house that we were happy to keep any items that were specific to the house. In my mind, this meant extra pieces of trim from the dining room or extra hardware for the kitchen. Sure, leave all the old paint cans. I’ll be bringing them to hazardous waste but those labels are useful if I ever need to match the trim color!

But no. Our sellers are boomers, and boomers think everything is useful. I found a box of old, busted up doorknobs and locks that I assumed were original to the house. Well, okay, kind of cool to know what they looked like, but when will we ever use these? And used bathroom vents… really? Why did you even keep these?!

They left large boxes of extra tiles from the last time they redid all the bathrooms. What are the chances that something terrible happens to the bathroom floor and we need to replace just a part of it and want to make sure we have matching tile? No, really, I am asking. What are the chances?!?

All this to say that moving day is in a week and shit is getting real. We closed on the new house in June, basically handed the keys directly to the contractor, and departed for Asia. The new house was a mess when we returned, covered in spackle and drywall dust and to be perfectly honest I’ve mostly been ignoring it and thinking of it as the contractor’s house. It’s less than a half mile from our current house and I have only been going up there once a week to make sure there isn’t water in the basement.

But the contractors are just about ready to hand it back off to us, which is why I’ve been over there wiping down surfaces and throwing things away the last two days.

Moving is weird. The last time I moved was twelve years ago and we had a lot less stuff. My oldest kid was not yet six months old, and my youngest didn’t exist. It was approximately six lifetimes ago, and I don’t even know how to approach moving now.

Also it sucks starting over in a new house. We love old houses, but old houses come with a lot of problems. We’ve been in our current house for long enough that we’ve repaired or replaced or painted or maintained pretty much every part of it. I know exactly how old all of the appliances are and which ones are on their last legs. I know where water accumulates in the backyard during a rainstorm, and I know which toilet is the best one for pooping.

I don’t know any of these things in the new house. Every day I spend there I discover new things: some bad, some good. Some days I walk out excited for our next chapter, and some days I close the door behind me and wonder if we’ve made a horrible mistake.

This is normal too, I know. We moved into this house in July. At some point in the next month there was a big thunderstorm and all of a sudden there was water coming into the house in six different places. I ran around with my baby in my arms and threw down towels and buckets. I was devastated that my new house was being destroyed by water, and knew we had made a huge financial mistake.

We were young and had a lot less money and no time, and it took us almost two full years to finally hire a contractor to tell us what was wrong with our house and fix it. It turns out we desperately needed a new roof, and that new roof–as I recall–resolved most but not all of the water intrusion issues. In later years we replaced the gutters and exterior trim and that resolved the water issues completely.

You know what’s most crazy? I can’t even remember exactly where all the water was coming in all those years ago. I used to run around putting out the towels and buckets before big storms. It was a big thing in my life! And I can’t even remember where all the towels needed to go!

And I am trying to remind myself that I will feel the same way after a decade in this new house. I won’t remember that the hot water heater stopped working a week before we moved in. I won’t recall what the box of old knobs looked like, or even that it existed in the first place. In twelve years, I will be able to tell you exactly which appliance is most likely to fail next, and how to best clean the windows, and where the Christmas tree should go.

I just have to get through the first couple months of chaos.

Despite having taken Japanese in college and knowing many people who have been to Japan in the last ten years, I was extremely intimidated by the process of planning a family trip to Japan. But we had an amazing time! We made some mistakes, yes, but we also had a lot of wins.

What we did right:

1. Go on a food tour.
   I have never gone on a food tour, but someone suggested it might be a fun way to get to know how the restaurants in Japan worked. They were right! Just seeing how the restaurant functioned and how to interact with the wait staff was extremely helpful. And the tour guide was able to answer some of my cultural questions. We had so much fun with Ninja Food Tours on our Tokyo food tour we ended up booking one for Kyoto too.
2. Book a lot of things on the first day (including your food tour), and very little after that.
   Okay, I only booked two things on our first full day in Japan, but it felt like a lot! And I was glad I did because it forced us to get up and get out of our hotel room and stay active in the sun for most of the day despite the jet lag. I booked very few activities for the rest of the trip. My planning mostly consisted of researching which high-priority sights we wanted to see (like Senso-ji Temple) and figuring out what else was nearby (Asakusa shopping district, Ninja Experience, Tokyo Skytree) that we might want to do while we’re in the neighborhood. We were easily able to adjust our daily itinerary due to weather and emotional bandwidth.
3. Pack light!
   We all brought carry-on sized luggage for a two-week trip: six outfits, jammies, fleece, raincoat, swimsuit, toiletries. This still left ample space for souvenirs. I made use of the coin laundry at our hotels when I could, and one time I used a public coin laundry. All of the washing machines added detergent for me, so I didn’t even have to worry about buying detergent. And packing light made things much easier when we were moving hotels and had to take our luggage on the subway. Also the carry-on size luggage is easy to bring with you on the shinkansen!
4. Bring an umbrella.
   It’s good for rain protection and good for sun protection; I used mine several times and was happy to have it!
5. Download the Suica card into your Apple Wallet before you go.
   Suica is how we paid for public transit in all three cities, and having it on our phones made it incredibly easy. If it’s on your phone it’s much easier to check your balance and you can add more yen very easily. Unfortunately, it does not work for children so we did have to buy the Welcome Suica card at the airport for the kids, but that was relatively easy.
6. Bring melatonin.
   Someone pointed out that melatonin didn’t necessarily help them fall asleep while traveling, but it helped them stay asleep through the night rather than do the 2 AM jet lag wakeup. I think this is true, and we made good use of melatonin our first five nights in Japan (and are using it now as we attempt to convert back to Minnesota time).
7. Learn a little Japanese ahead of time.
   I had taken Japanese in college, so I jumped back on Duolingo for the six months before our trip to try to refresh my knowledge. I was able to function okay in Japanese while we were there, and Google Translate was useful although sometimes questionable. I highly recommend the book Japanese for Travelers, which had a great deal of good cultural information as well as useful language help in it. You should also learn how to count food items and how to count people up to the number in your party.
8. Go somewhere beyond Tokyo and Kyoto.
   My husband convinced me to add Hiroshima to the last couple days of our itinerary and we all agreed it was our favorite stop. Tokyo is amazing. Kyoto is amazing. But it felt really good to spend time in a smaller, slower city for a little bit.
9. Bring a tiny backpack for everyone.
   I made everyone bring their own tiny backpack because I’m tired of being the mom who carries All the Things All the Time. So everyone was able to tote around their own souvenirs, water bottles, umbrellas, and garbage. (Yes, it is true that there are very few public trash cans in Japan and you are expected to carry your garbage home with you.) This mini backpack was perfect.
10. Carry a pair of socks with you.
    It was hot and I wore sandals the whole time, but kept a pair of socks in my mini backpack. There are restaurants and tourist destinations that do not allow shoes but do require socks. I only needed them twice, but I was glad to have them!
11. Don’t bring a water bottle.
    A friend who has been to Tokyo recently gave me this advice. If you bring your giant metal water bottle you’re just going to be toting around an empty bottle all day as there are no places to refill water bottles. It is not an exaggeration to say that there are vending machines selling water on nearly every block in Tokyo. It is incredibly easy and cheap to just buy plastic water bottles throughout the day and that’s how you should plan your hydration efforts.

Here are some things you should not do:

1. Pack a fleece for summer travel.
   I packed my stupid fleece all the way across the Pacific Ocean because some of the packing advice told me that I would want it due to how much the Japanese run their air conditioning. This was incorrect. Not a single time did I even begin to consider needing a fleece. I would totally skip this if you’re going in June, July, August, or September.
2. Separate your shinkansen trip from your airport trip.
   We ended our trip in Hiroshima and had to take the bullet train (shinkansen) back up to Tokyo in order to fly home. I didn’t have access to the shinkansen schedule at the time, and didn’t want to roll the dice by having a delayed train prevent us from making our flight. As a result, we spent an extra night in Tokyo when we really didn’t need to. If you miss your shinkansen there will be another one within the next fifteen minutes that you can hop onto. They run a tight schedule, and if we were to go again I wouldn’t hesitate to book shinkansen and airplane on the same day.
3. Bring a tiny amount of cash.
   We did not bring enough cash. I had not realized how ubiquitous and tempting the gacha machines would be, or that they would only take 100 yen coins. I also did not realize how often we would need coins to pay for fortunes at temples, or just to make donations at shrines. We also ran into several restaurants and shops that were cash only. We made use of ATMs to acquire more cash as we went, but our bank would have gotten us a better conversion rate, and I would start out with far more cash (maybe 40,000 yen) next time.
4. Only bring Crocs.
   Okay, I did not make this mistake myself, but at least one of my kids did. Crocs just don’t provide enough support for all the walking you’re going to do. Get something better. And another anonymous family member failed to buy new sandals for the trip until the day before we departed and spent the first four days in Japan dealing with blisters. Buy high quality footwear early and break it in before you go!
5. Plan a trip for more than two weeks.
   Well, maybe this is a personal issue of mine. Our trip was fourteen days including all travel to and from the United States, and we were all very ready to go home by about day twelve. I know there are all those Instagram families out there who are traveling full-time or for several months of the year, but I don’t know how they do it. I missed my cats and my bed and my own shower and my car.

Despite the language barrier and cultural differences and the huge time zone difference, we did find traveling in Japan relatively easy. I saw a lot of stuff that I have always wanted to see but never expected to see. Our kids are ten (juu sai) and twelve (juu-ni sai) now, and they were really excellent travelers throughout the entire trip. There was a time when even taking them to visit their grandparent’s non-babyproofed house was a massive, stressful ordeal, and it boggles my mind that they are old enough now that we can actually enjoy a big international trip like this together. We have six summers left together before our oldest heads off to college, so hoping to fit one or two more big international trips in in that time.

My oldest kid had a strange homework assignment the other day: ask your parent about a natural disaster that they have experienced.

My first thought was that I hadn’t lived through any natural disasters, but upon reflection I realized that I have.

1. The Tyee Fire Complex, 1994
   I’ve blogged about this one before. We had lived in our little mountain resort town for about six years at that point, and I don’t think we had experienced a major wildfire before this. It was a sunny summer afternoon when the smoke moved into the valley, bringing news of this new fire. Now the sun was a red disc in the sky.
   
   Usually in July and August our small town was swarmed with tourists, but they soon disappeared and firefighters appeared in their place. The grocery store parking lot was full of fire-fighting vehicles, and the town was now full of young men in thick firefighter pants and dirty shirts. Helicopters went back and forth all day scooping water from our lake to dump it on the fire. The local radio station played Smoke on the Water and Black Hole Sun and other fire-themed songs in between regular fire updates.
   
   The smoke settled into the valley and stayed and stayed and stayed, so thick we weren’t allowed to go outside even though the air inside the house was slightly smokey too. Some people began running sprinklers on their roofs. My mom finally grew concerned enough that she packed all three of us off Grandma and Grandpa’s farm where the air was still clear and clean.
   
   While we were away, the line of wildfire came down the hills, threatening to jump the river gorge and engulf the town. I still have the dark, grainy video that my dad took that night. I was upset for years to have missed that moment.
   
2. Satsop Earthquake, 1999
   I was stretched out on the floor of my dad’s house watching TV that evening when the floor started to shake and roll. It was not very intense, and I only found out later that it had been an earthquake.
   
3. Nisqually Earthquake, 2001
   Remember how big and bulky TVs were before flatscreens were invented? Remember how in school there was always a giant, heavy TV balanced on a tiny metal arm mount in the corner of every classroom? Well, I was sitting under that TV in my junior year math class when the room–and especially the TV–started shaking.
   
   This was the most intense earthquake I have ever experienced. We all ducked under our tables, and my friend M who had just moved to Washington from the East Coast a few years before started sobbing and weeping with fear. My main concern was keeping clear of the TV!
   
   The TV did not fall that day, and in fact less than seven months later I would watch the events of 9/11 (after both towers had collapsed) play out on the same television.
   
4. Virginia Earthquake, 2011
   This is my favorite of my earthquake-specific memories. I was sitting at my desk on the third floor of a small office building near Union Square in Manhattan when the floor started shaking and rolling a little bit. I recognized the rolling sensation, turned to my coworker who was a lifelong New York resident, and asked if they ever had earthquakes in New York.
   
   “No,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
   
   I actually don’t remember how we found out it was a real earthquake. My husband was in a high-rise office building at the time and I believe they evacuated. I don’t think we evacuated but man that was a shitty building and we probably should have.
   

After recounting all these incidents to my oldest child, he sighed and said, “I wish I could experience a disaster someday.”

Um, excuse me, aren’t you the same kid who came home one Friday in first grade and didn’t return to school for over a year because the Covid-19 pandemic forced the world to close? Aren’t you the same kid who still has a piece of melted metal from the car that was set on fire across the street during the George Floyd riots of that same year?

Just the other day, my youngest related that one of his earliest memories is of me telling him that someday he would be one of the oldest people alive who would remember the Covid-19 pandemic. Ironically, he remembers me saying that, but really doesn’t remember anything about the pandemic itself!

I fail as a fortune teller.

I told my oldest that if he wanted to experience a good earthquake he should go to college in Washington, where they are also overdue for a good volcano eruption. (I am still mad that I missed the eruption of Saint Helens by about two and a half years.)

We’re coming up on Memorial Day Weekend here. The city empties out considerably on those long summer weekends.

Now that we are cabin owners, we haven’t spent a summer holiday weekend in the Cities in a long time. I actually kind of miss the empty sidewalks and restaurants, and the feeling that we were on the only ones in the entire bookstore. I miss not being stuck in traffic on Memorial Day as the entire population of the Twin Cities returns to the metro area all at once. Sad trombone noise for the poor little rich girl.

What I really want to blog about is my job, and race relations at my job. But I am still processing a lot of the things I have seen and heard and quietly noticed. This will take years. Also, I’m not sure of a respectful way to put stuff like that in a public blog. And as a white person I’m a little hesitant to comment out loud on anything having to do with race, at all, ever.

I feel like the paragraph above sounds very cryptic and like there is something horrible going on right now that should be reported. That is not the case. I’m pretty sure the county social worker would hang up on me if I called to report that there are not enough Black teachers at a school with a majority Black student population.

I am taking piano lessons next year, and I am very excited about it. In part because settling into piano lessons this fall will signify that we have made it to the end of our crazy summer of travel and moving and selling a house. But I am also excited because I haven’t had piano lessons in twenty-three years, and I am ready to take my playing to the next level. Or… back to a level that I was already at like twenty-four years ago, at least. I do play pretty regularly, and I have gained back a lot of what I had lost during the interregnum of no access to a piano, but I’ve plateaued at my current level and am ready to move forward.

I’ve wanted to take piano lessons for a while, but I was unable to commit with my eventual employment uncertain for what felt like several years. But my job is solid and I’ve finally got my chance to get back on the piano bench. So to speak.

Sadly, I have learned that employment with a public school district is often dependent on the rising or falling fortunes of the district itself and not on your job performance. So I am planning to enjoy the hell out of this one summer when I will know where I’m going and what I’m doing in the fall. You know, when I’m not totally freaking out over all the life changes.

Ugh, I am so nervous about our upcoming trip to Japan.

It doesn’t help that we just have too much going on in June anyway. And the fact that we’re going to own exactly three properties while we’re on the other side of the world–oh, and two of those properties will be empty while we’re away. That’s a bit of a cause for concern, no?

And there’s the language barrier. And the jet lag. And the flight over the Pacific. And the possibility of illness or injury while in a foreign country. And the possibility of a cat experiencing grave illness or injury while we are in a foreign country.

I could go on, but I don’t need to. The real heart of the problem is that I am not built to be away from home.

I love home; home is the best. I know where to find the scissors and where the best spot on the couch is. I can do laundry whenever I want. My cats are here, my kids are here, my husband is here.

Being not at home is terrible. There are people and they might look at me. They might greet me. A car might come down the street, or a plane might fly overhead. I might not be able to find the kind of bread my kids like at the store, and while I’m there I might have an awkward social interaction.

I suspect that this is what other people enjoy about going out and doing things: the excitement of the unanticipated.

Not me. I need to be able to anticipate everything. I frequently play out conversations in my head before I have them. I fret about the people around me and the emotions they might be having. I do not like surprises, even good ones.

All of these difficulties are, of course, magnified in a foreign country. I’ve practiced ordering coffee and ice cream, but I still can’t anticipate what it will be like to actually order food in a restaurant in Japan. I don’t know what the locals are going to be thinking about me and my family when we’re trying to navigate the Tokyo public transit system. And then there’s the issue of my limited language skills. Sumimasen! Wakarimasen!

All of this to say: can I blame my being a shitty traveler on undiagnosed neurodivergence? It seems like all of my peers are getting late-in-life neurodivergence diagnoses, and to be honest it makes me want to roll my eyes a little. If 50% of people in a generation have an ADHD diagnosis, then is it really a thing that needs to be diagnosed? On the other hand, I’ve long wondered about my own neurodivergence, and the longer I am alive the more I start to inspect the components of my personality and wonder if they are actually symptoms.

I have no intention of seeking out a diagnosis. I understand myself much better than any psychologist or autism influencer ever could and it’s waaaaaaaay too late for those early childhood interventions.

But it sure would be nice to be able to blame autism. It’s not that I am stubborn and scared and unwilling to adapt! It’s that I’m autistic! I’m not easily overwhelmed because I am weak–I’m easily overwhelmed because I’m easily overstimulated.

And I’m not a bad traveler, I’m just an autistic traveler. Right?