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On Tuesday, my brain–well, my heart–undermined my marriage.
Here’s what happened on the outside.
Last week, I brought happy-hour Sonic drinks to my friend’s empty sixth-grade classroom. She’d decked it out as only excited teachers can, with pillowed reading corners complete with fairy lights, innovative seating, and wave bottles she’d made herself, with glitter inside.
We chatted, and I laughed about her curiously-labeled drawer of Bummer Pencils. A bummer pencil, she explained, is one she’s picked up off the floor or from a desk, maybe half-chewed or with no eraser. She saves those–I’m assuming she disinfects them?–for the time when a sixth-grader raises their hand with the news they have no pencil.
Late one night last week, my husband arrived home to tell me we needed to get the car in the shop pronto. I decided to take it in after my dentist’s appointment the next morning (y’know, all the things I love at once: the dentist’s chair, taking an ailing car to the mechanic). As I pulled up to the stoplight, there were indeed some alarm bells going off in my head. You know it’s bad when the engine light is on. But what about when it’s, uh, flashing?
Well. Now I think it’s a little bit like the “blue screen of death”. The engine was shot. And when I say shot, I mean shot. As in, oil pumping out of a broken piston, etc. Even I, with my wee knowledge of mechanical workings, know this is bad.
So that happened.
In all honesty, with my house still lined with cardboard moving boxes, camping was not at the top of my priority. When my dad burst into a rendition of a song entitled (I kid you not) “We’re Going Camping Now!”, I admit to replying with a chipper, “Whether we like it or not!” I could barely find underwear for everyone. I’d been in some form of transitional housing for the last year. Let’s go sleep in a tent without a shower!
But as we wove through the mountains, I had to admit that maybe it was good this was blacked out on the calendar. How long had it been since I’d been able to tell everyday life “Stop. For right now, just stop”?
My sheepishness reached its hilt the next day when my kids’ skin was glittering and shivering as they picked their way through the river, counting rainbow trout and daring each other to duck beneath the current. Their courage and confidence mounted before my eyes. The spikes of pine behind them were stunning; the rock formations solid and timeless.
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