It's Monday here in the land of the flogged blog. We are going on a short, four day "vacation" this week. The thing about vacations around our Ponderosa is this: we have to work our collective asses off before we leave. My lovely bride wants the house to be cleaned top to bottom, base boards scrubbed, rooms repainted (this year that actually happened), yard manicured, demons exercised, atoms split (without making a mess)...you get the picture. Three days prior to liftoff you are assigned one fork, spoon, bowl, plate and glass to use so as not to cause any further negative impact on our otherwise sanitary environment prior to departure. The last meal before our well planned exit ends with everyone's eating utensils being dropped into the dishwasher on the way out the door. That's after we've "enjoyed" a breakfast of every spoil-able item left in our refrigerator. That means pop-tarts with left over gravy, celery with eggs, yogurt in the flavors no one will eat, meatloaf (good at any meal) and a glass of milk whose expiration date will hit while we are away. The last thing to happen inside our spotless home is to push the "scrub" cycle on the dishwasher and hit the "GO" button. It's done by me, so I can shoulder the blame if something goes wrong while we are away. I'm also in charge of locking all the doors. For some reason, I don't want to risk a kid handling something so important. My prayer is that the water line running to the dishwasher doesn't bust as soon as we hit the bottom of the driveway, but I hit the button anyway knowing my wife will be unsettled the entire time away if the dishes aren't clean before she gets home.
My bride just likes the house to be clean before she leaves and I can appreciate that. The explanation for this behavior revolves around one undeniable truth. She is depressed when she is vacated out, knowing it might be a year before she sees the beach or the mountain lake again and coming home to a spotless house somehow makes it better. Never mind the hell we all endured to get it that way, and the three days of expensive vacation sleep it will take us all to recover from getting ready to go. Recovery from the pre-vacation activities is expensive and tiring.
Vacations have always made me stop and ponder. You take all your "stuff", as George Carlin put it, and haul that stuff to a remote location of your choosing, and spend a week in a place that cost more than it costs to run your household for a month, all under the guise of fun. I guess the only person who really worries about the cost of it all is Daddio. That is up until Wednesday or Thursday of the trip, then the "what the hell" gene surfaces and dad kicks the spending machine into high gear, just to the point that mom asks "can we afford all of this?". Of course, the answer is no. But ya do it anyway.
I'm about to hit the button on the dishwasher as I exit. It's the first trip my lovely bride of thirty years and I will take with none of our kids in tow. They've all grown up and are convinced they are all individually and collectively smarter than the two of us combined. For the first time she isn't feeling guilty about us doing something together, just the two of us, and that is refreshing. That's quite a milestone for her. I've been warning her for the past 27 years that these days would soon come. I guess "warning" isn't correct, I used to remind her that someday it would be just us two again to somehow make the reality of raising three kids a little easier back when it was indeed tough. Later it became more of a warning, as a means of preparing her for the days when it would be just us two again. Twenty seven years. That's how long it's been since our first child was born, and the long promised days of "just us" have finally arrived. This year, the house was easier to clean. There are less occupants messing it up and that was a good thing.
This trip is totally off the cuff. Nothing planned other than the direction we are headed, and that is North. Not so north that you'll not a see a "Fergit Hell" tag on the front of an occasional rusty old pick-up truck, a reminder of the Civil War loss the South endured a hundred and thirty-five or so plus years back, but North just the same. I'm using this trip to hopefully remind my sweetheart that it is OK to just go "that-a-way" and we'll find us a room to stay in. We've got each other for company and that's enough.
We're in the South, the land of my birth, and we'll work it out. We always have. We'll keep it this side of the Mason-Dixon just in case.
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