Okay, my friends, things might be a little bit of a mess here. I quite possibly, maybe, just maybe, sat on the kitchen floor last night with a tub of cookie dough (it was vegan) talking to my dishwasher. I asked the kids to talk only in quiet voices to the dishwasher as they brought in their dirty bowls and plates and to please use only kind words towards it. Mommy was refraining from spewing her prized collection of curse words and was instead creating a soulful, Tony-award winning song for the dishwasher about trusty appliances and how they always see us through even in the darkest of times. Skull-cracking eye roll. That little jerk pretended to work for 30 seconds and then quit again. Time for the curse words, you evil, non-deserving-of-my-beautiful-song appliance. I put my cookie dough away- ok let’s be real, I recycled the EMPTY container and stood my tired ass up and did the dishes.
Pretty much everything in this house is broken. Not everyone would have chosen this 1970’s beach house. I did. Honestly, if you look hard enough you can pretty much see those boozy late 70’s pool parties with women in gauzy caftans and that guy on the diving board sporting his tightest banana-hammock Speedo. Cigarettes dangling from fingertips and melty ice cubes in maraschino cherry-laden cocktails. I totally want to go to that party. The front door barely shuts, and I recently had to wear work gloves and pull out shards of glass from one of the tempered glass panes. Everything smells faintly of mildew, including our clothes now. The kitchen faucet leaks constantly and sports a towel wrapped around it to direct the floodwater into the sink. The air conditioner is questionable, and tiny nails stick out of the well-loved floorboards-Bodey runs around with a hammer tamping them back down. The stove kind of works- we only speak gentle words around the stove, as well. The wallpaper is holding strong though- all 15 walls of it. Shiny, silver palm frond wallpaper. We live in a swingers’ museum.
I also have failed to find the time to write, and when writing doesn’t happen, I am like the Mentos/Coke bottle experiment. (That experiment makes me want to cry. I can’t tell you how many times my back patio has been covered in sticky soda spots. A mess.) Ready to explode. So here is my explosion of truth. Our homeschool days are disastrously-beautiful (and chaotic) hours filled with math, writing, history lessons, robotics experiments, Piper frowning at all of us as we try to teach her letters and numbers, spelling contests, mid-afternoon meltdowns, then wild animal shrieks as we run to the beach, rulers and lined paper flying out behind us. The beach allows us to forget we are a little bit lonely here. I’m a little bit lonely. Isolated island days of going against the grain can make a girl question if she is doing right by her children. Another undercurrent of change is coming for our family, too. That is a story for another post I will share another time- promise.
And once again, Cecily’s random running playlist to the rescue. I must absolutely look insane running with these monologues of mish-mashed songs in my head, delivering much-needed sweat therapy to my soul.
“Bring me to your house and tell me sorry for the mess….. Hey I don’t mind. You’re talking in your sleep, out of time. Well, you still make sense to me, your mess is mine.”
Thanks, Vance.
Macklemore played before him. Glorious.
This glorious mess is all mine.
xoxoxoxoxo
