Long Weekend
Frick and Frack. This is the scene I found when I brought up the coffee: Chris and Charlotte watching the Food Network together.
We stayed in our jammies until late in the day . . .
Charlotte and I played and played and played while Daddy spent two whole days working on his garden.
We went on an exciting walk to the post office to mail Cousin Maggie's birthday gift.
And . . . we napped. Real exciting, huh? Memorial Day weekend has always been the cue to launch summer, but the beginning of summer has meant squat to me for several years. Why? Because I don’t like summer. There, I said it. Summers here are oppressively hot and humid, so being outdoors is quite unpleasant. Second, it’s not like we have summer vacation. Nope, we just keep going to work. Finally, and this is the kicker, we don’t DO anything. While a lot families head to the coast, rent that mountain cabin, or take a road trip to the Grand Canyon, we don’t do anything at all. This weekend, we went to the grocery store and Home Depot. That. Was. It. This summer nothingness bugs me. Greatly. So yesterday, as our 3-day weekend was in its final hours, I fell into a mental slump. When Chris asked why I was being such a downer, I explained my dislike of summer. “But we’re going to Reno in July,” he said. “That’s doing something.” “True,” I said. “But don’t you think it’s kind of ridiculous that we’ll spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to fly to Reno and use two days of vacation time just with travel, but we can’t be bothered to do anything in our own neck of the woods? I'm not saying nix the Reno/Seattle trips. They're important and it's great to see family. But what about the rest of the summer? Do we always need to fly all the way across the country to get away for a few days?” Chris pondered this. “That’s kind of a good point.” (Oh, bless him for not rolling his eyes and telling me to snap out of my funk.) “So what do you want to do?” I had my answer ready. “I want to be near a major body of water.” “Such as?” he asked. “The ocean.” Here’s one of my big East Coast gripes. A puddle = a pond. A pond = a lake. A bay = the ocean. I guess growing up where my family boated on Lake Washington and Chris's family boated on Lake Tahoe has skewed our sense of scale as to what constitutes a decent-sized body of water. Our version of water doesn’t quite match up to what locals consider to be a lake. I’m just itching to get to a beach where there are waves and sand, not some mosquito-ridden pond that’s too small to even handle a paddle boat. So Chris and I talked. We had been kicking around the idea of going to Seattle over Labor Day, but we’re going to look into escaping to the coast instead—perhaps North Carolina. This mollified me a bit. But still, there was a bigger problem still lingering. “Do you get that we don’t DO anything?” I asked. “We either overcomplicate 'doing something' by involving air travel, baggage fees, parking fees, and airport security, or we debate whether or not we need to go to Costco to get more diapers. It’s like we don’t allow ourselves to do anything out of the ordinary except for the one big trip to Reno or Seattle each summer, and I don’t know why that is. And we can't blame Charlotte, because we never do anything during the summer.” “So what do you want to do?” Chris asked. “I want to see the ocean.” “We’ll look into it. What else?” “I want to go to Sugarloaf Mountain Winery and then do lunch at that cute little inn up there.” “Okay. What else?” “I want to go to Annapolis and eat a crab cake.” “Okay. What else?” “I don’t know. I just want to GET OUT and not just do laundry every weekend.”
Now, don't get me wrong. I loved getting to spend so much time with Charlotte and knocking some household things off the perpetual to-do list. Maybe I needed too many days at home to get antsy enough to get some fun lined up for the summer. I think that if we make more of an effort to avoid getting stuck in a rut, we’ll have a perfectly nice summer.
I just may even become a fan of summer again.
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