Binge Dating

It is my husband's final weekend of work for a couple of months after spending the last ten months on the road.  It feels like he's been gone all of the time, even though I know it was more like 3-4 day stretches with the occasional crazy mixed in there (see "The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem" or "Instructions for Crazy").  I have been waiting for this light at the end of the tunnel feeling for months, and it's so bright now that I'm squinting.  Ah!  The light, the light, the glorious light!

After Memorial Day weekend, Brandon and I have three solid days of dating planned.  It happened accidentally. I am going to New York City on Wednesday to accept an award on behalf of the Ashland Poetry Press (woo!), and it just so happens that Wednesday is Brandon's birthday.  What better way to spend your birthday than with me in NYC?!  We're staying one night and bounding back to Ohio on Thursday, but then, THEN, we are going to see Tim McGraw at Blossom on Friday night, a gift from Mr. Awesome-Husband.  

I am so freaking excited about this stretch of three days. 

That is kind of bad news.  I am the queen of getting my hopes up.  I've already imagined the lolling tongue grin I'll have plastered on my face at the concert with my husband's arm around my waist as we belt out with the crowd, "Where the green grass grows."  I can taste the sizzle of dinner in the city, the cool heat of whiskey or martini after our meal, the twinkly glow of city lights dancing in the night, the melt and anticipation for the rest of our evening, cool sheets, down pillows, the silence of no-children, the useless alarm on the nightstand, the muffled roar of the city below our window.

This is kind of bad news because you really can't plan to be romanced.  Oh, I can hope for it and rev up to it and dress up and psych myself but I can't predict or prepare for how our trip will go.  You can't plan which memories will stick as a future touchstone.  The quickening heart only beats harder in reminiscence.  I feel it now because we have been in these scenes before and my heart warms at the memory-- other concerts, other cities, other dinners, boardwalks and sidewalks and forest hikes and hot tubs and rose petals in soap bubbles-- but in the moment, we were just walking.  Just eating.  Just coming down from a wedding or a movie or a play or a good show, and man, weren't those seats great right there by the stage and he sang every song we love it was so good let's play the CD of him again and sing along loud down the highway home.

Is it weird to look forward to a trip and a concert so that you can also look back at it with the warmth of nostalgia and familiarity later?  I think back on the day I graduated from Ashland, how I squeezed Brandon's hand in the car on the way home after dinner that night, how I smiled and said, "This has been a really great day," how he detoured to downtown Cuyahoga Falls and then how we walked the shadowy boardwalk by the falls, the water raging below, the highway racing above, branches low and full of leaves around us, how he stopped and knelt, and I knew, yes, finally, yes, yes, I will!  It was the only day he could have picked to propose that he knew I wouldn't be anticipating a ring.

I couldn't know then as the day played out that I would return to this memory, turn it around in my hand like a smooth stone to feel the cool air on my skin, the cold band on my finger, the rush of my breath and our embrace, that promise, that choice.  How could I know?  But I hold that memory, tuck it in an aura with all of the other small and significant moments I've collected.  So much would follow that proposal, so much more heartache, so much more joy than any one person can fathom from that starting position.  Only from this current peak can one comprehend the distance and majesty of the preceding hike.

All I see this coming week is the trail and some trees, a little slope to the climb but nothing much to strain against.  So as we enter into our binge dating after so many stolen minutes between work and homework and baths and bedtime songs and wrinkled baskets of laundry, we will drive to the airport like it is an ordinary day, stroll the streets of another city like they are just sidewalks, eat food as if that's just what you do to survive after all, and roll towards the middle of the king-size bed because, sure, we're tired, but we're not that tired.  It will be an ordinary day, but all of that ordinariness, well, it is woven in this unique pattern between my husband and me.  And that's extraordinary.

Family Vacations, Then and Now

This weekend marked the first family vacation with my side of the family since the Great Myrtle Beach Thanksgiving Vacation Disaster of 2007. None of us said anything to reference it, but as we set up our campers at the state park on Friday night, cold wind whipping across the lake and blowing in heavy bursts of rain, I'm sure we were all thinking of it.

Back in 2007, my husband and my mom set out around 8 p.m. on the weekend before Thanksgiving with the hopes that our potty training 18-month-old daughter and 3-month-old son would drift off to sleep shortly after leaving, and they could drive through the night, arriving in the sunny Carolinas around breakfast, a bright November sun burning off the fog in the foothills, and two well-rested children slowly stirring in the back seat.

Instead, the two kids took turns keeping the other one awake, Lydia crying every time they drove under a row of streetlights or caught the headlights of oncoming drivers heading back the way they came.  Brandon and my mom took turns trying to pin clothes to the window to block the lights, played music, didn't play music, sung, gave bottles over the back seat, anything, anything to get them to sleep.

Meanwhile, I was at home, sleeping soundly in my empty house and bed after spending most of the night painting the living room red.  I stayed behind because I had just started my job at the University that fall and for some reason I decided that my five vacation days that year would be best used some other time.  I would work the first two days of the week and then just fly down on Wednesday.  No big deal.

The family van rolled into Myrtle Beach on Sunday, alive.  I flew down to Wilmington from Columbus and arrived at the airport, ready to see my happy family at the beach for a long weekend.  Utopian dreams of previous vacations drifted in my brain, full weeks spent wandering the beach and strolling about with both my side of the family and his, smiling, sunset gazing, sandcastle building, everyone jolly and hugging and wishing it would never end. 

My phone rang as I got off the plane.  It was Brandon.  A deer ran out in front of the van on his way to the airport and the van was undriveable.  A tow truck was on its way.  You'll have to rent a van, he said, we'll get this one repaired and pick it up on our way back out of town. 

Only no mechanics work the week of Thanksgiving.  We'd have to come back for it.

The two of us rolled in to the condo and slipped as quiet as possible into the bedroom, under the blankets, the bed creaking just enough to wake up Lydia.  Mommy?  And then four hours of children awake.

Thus began our Thanksgiving vacation at the beach.  Dad and the boys arrived about the same time as I did on Wednesday and we ate our Thanksgiving dinner together in the condo.  We wrapped up the weekend with a family blow-out and a one-way rental back to Ohio. 

And now.  We huddled around the campfire started with lighter fluid between the two campers, hoods up over our ears to block the wind gusts, and grumbled about the weather with my brother and his wife and my parents while the kids slept in the camper.  Lydia is now six, Elvis almost five and Henry just over a year old. 

In the morning, we cooked eggs and bacon over the fire, still battling the chilly wind.  This figures! I muttered.  Can't plan anything.  We took the kids to the playground, wobbled over the limestone boulders down to the lake side so the kids could throw in sticks, and at lunch we moved the campers to another less windy part of the park.  And then, then it was like the old days - the really old days - of fishing and cooking and roasting marshmallows and cooking hobo pie and riding bikes and making fast friends from the campsite across the way (hello, Lisa).

Only this time, it was me and my family giving it to the kids, my brother teaching them to fish, my husband playing catch with the older two and chasing Henry across the grass, all of us cooking and singing and drinking and eating, and me, grinning like I just caught my first bluegill by the water.