Rock and Load

It's Saturday morning and I'm listening to my son doing color commentary on the state of the refrigerator.

"This is disgusting. Yuck. Who put this in here?"

He marches out of the kitchen and thrusts a half empty can of green chilis toward me.

"Mom, are we saving this?"

I don't want to crush my child's newly found zeal for search and destroy style housekeeping, but I happen to know that my husband put this can of chilis in the fridge, doubtless planning to use it for some culinary masterpiece in the near future. If I tell my son to throw it away, my husband might be annoyed. I weigh my husband's probable future irritation with my son's overwhelming need to use the bulldozer approach to cleaning the refrigerator, i.e., everything not nailed down gets pushed into the nearest garbage can, resulting in an appliance that is sparkly clean, fresh smelling, and above all, emptier than when you started.

I recall feeling exactly this way a long time ago, just prior to our move from Grand Rapids to Ludington, except that it was a house I was emptying instead of a refrigerator. I'd been upstairs cleaning the attic and stumbled across a large sack in one corner. Inside the sack were rough pieces of alabaster, pink and white and gray-veined, ranging from a few as small as a baseball to some as big as a loaf of bread.

Maybe it had something to do with being hot and dusty from hours of clearing the detritus that had accumulated after twelve years of cohabitative bliss, maybe it was because I knew that I'd only scratched the surface of what still needed to be organized, maybe it was because I distinctly recalled having moved this same sack of rocks at least three times in the last seven years, but right then I knew I'd never hated anything as much as I hated those rocks.

It didn't matter anymore that I and my husband had driven six hours to collect these very stones, sacrificing an entire afternoon to climb around on quarry piles in the hot sun, determined to find the perfect raw material for sculpting candle holders, incense burners and miniature busts.

That day in the attic I had exactly 72 hours before I had to pile everything we owned into a 24-foot truck. The contents of that sack were no longer potential art projects, they were a bag of rocks that weighed about thirty pounds and they represented everything I hated about moving.

I hated having to organize and pack up our stuff in order to move it when it was only going to get unpacked and disorganized the moment we reached our destination. I hated making choices about what had to go or stay and I particularly hated making choices about someone else's belongings, which these rocks technically were. They weren't just my rocks. They were my husband's rocks, too.

That's why I decided to do what I did. After all, he was already at the new place, possibly working hard and not having to pack up the old house. I was resentful about the whole arrangement. Also I was getting help loading the U-Haul from my brother and already was having a hard time justifying the bajillion books that were coming with us. ("Don't they have books in Ludington?") How could I possibly explain a bag of rocks? ("Marie, did you know that this sack has rocks in it?" "Yes." "Don't they have rocks in Ludington?")

Decision made, I crashed the sack down three flights of stairs and dragged it to the curb for the garbage men to take away in the morning. If I didn't accomplish anything else that day it was fine, because the bag of rocks was gone and that was four square feet of misery I wouldn't have to cram on the truck.

The next day on the phone, my husband asked me if I'd remembered to pack a certain bag of rocks. Naturally I told him that I had no idea where they were. Thinking about it fifteen years later, I'm sure I'd throw them away and lie about it again, no problem.

Now my son stands in front of me with can in hand. He's transferred his irritation with me for giving him this particular chore to the refrigerator itself and his body is stiff with that air of righteousness that's so conducive to a good cleaning session. I know exactly how he feels.

"Go ahead and pitch it," I say. "I'll think of something to tell your dad."

What I've learned (since yesterday)

Living on a budget is a lot harder than I thought it would be and even though the little budget monitor in Quicken with the colored bars says I've overspent in six categories with two weeks left in January, I'm in the yellow in six more and green in the other twenty so it's all right.

My herbal tea tastes a lot better with lemon in it and it's worth $3.99 a bag to have the lemons in the house so I can drink it that way.

My family prefers to talk my ear off at the end of the day when I'm flat on my back in bed and hovering between guilty attentiveness and desperately sought after oblivion.

Some days my boys are perfectly ready to sit at the table and study math or listen to French tapes but other days they only settle down once they've been outside and beaten each other over the head with foam wrapped pvc pipes.

Darning a sock using six different colors of embroidery floss is a lot more satisfying than using just plain white. Sometimes I wish the holes were on the tops of my socks so I could more readily admire my patch jobs.

Doing embroidery is the best way to watch a scary movie because I'm so concentrated on what I'm doing that I can't see the graphic torture scenes that seem to be prominently featured in every dvd we get the the library lately and which will haunt me until the day I die.

The mail does get delivered on Martin Luther King Jr.'s actual birthday so this year my quarterly tax payment for January 15 will be one day late.

I don't need to print out my favorite color palette to use for a reference because it's in my head.

Drying sheets on a clothes line in the sun beats tumble drying every single time even if it takes two days on account of rain.

When I call my mother and there's an awkward silence in the middle of our conversation it's because she's holding the phone away from her ear and she can't tell that I've stopped talking.

I can sit on the couch for three hours at a time watching a football game between two teams that I couldn't care less about.

Sometimes when a child gets up in the middle of the night it's not because he's in agony from a muscle cramp or having an asthma attack or sleepwalking but just because he needs to use the bathroom.

As long as my son wants me to stop whatever I'm doing to come admire his computer animation project I will do it, even if I don't share his same fascination for mechanical killing machines and stick men.

Popcorn with butter and salt and Parmesan cheese will never take the place of Lay's Potato Chips with sour cream but it's pretty close.

The little signs indicating the changing seasons in northern Florida include: lizards and window frogs disappearing sometime around Christmas; red maples putting out new leaves at New Year's; seed packets going on sale at Walgreen's ten for a dollar two weeks before the Super Bowl.

Driving like a jerk just happens when you're in an SUV. When I drive my Natural Disaster other drivers slam on their brakes anticipating that I'll cut them off, so I usually do because when everyone is going 80 mph it's not a good idea to be messing with people's expectations.

Transformations

She's a lot younger in the mornings
before we begin the walk.
Her body is a coiled spring
the leash a live squirrel in her mouth.
She shakes and waggles and bounces.
Then we pass through the gate
and she's all business,
sniffing, peeing, heeling.
By the time we turn the last corner
she's acting her age,
doggedly making her way back
to food, water,
and the soft spot on the couch.

Making friends

I've begun to feel more at home here in the south and I think it's because I've finally made some new friends. I still have all my old friends back in Michigan, still write to them as often as I can, still plan on visiting when I make it back north, but there's nothing like having a girlfriend available for a cup of coffee and a good talk every now and then. That had been missing until just recently.

It was hard after we moved. I wasn't quite prepared for how isolated it would feel to be plopped down 1800 miles away from everything I knew. A friend who recently relocated from Colorado to Arizona said it was like "moving to Mars," and it was. I thought a little thing like a two-day drive wouldn't be such a big deal. I could always send pictures via email or chat with people online. And there was a Wal-mart on every corner down here, just like everywhere else. But it was weird. People talked differently. I had to keep asking my neighbor to repeat herself, tried faking comprehension a couple of times and then one day I broke down and asked her what some of her phrases actually meant. She didn't know either.

I recognized that I was lonely and, remembering what I had done when I first moved to Ludington, I called the Jacksonville Chamber and was shocked to discover that it was going to be a lot more expensive to become one with the local business community than it had been in my old home town. Truthfully, half the fun of going to the meetings in Ludington was sitting at a table with someone you knew. It was never about networking, unless you counted yakking with friends as networking.

In desperation I joined a health club. This worked a little better. At least I was around women for an hour a day. Unfortunately, we spent so much effort trying to hear the authoritative voice from the speakers telling us when to change stations that there was very little concentration left over for plain old girl talk.

I started to wonder if I wasn't doomed to be friendless in Florida. Maybe I'd already used up my quota for friends according to some universal scorecard. Maybe I just sucked as a friend and it was obvious to everyone but me. Or maybe I was just out of practice at finding friends. It had been a while since I'd had to start from scratch.

I thought about the first friend I ever had, a girl in kindergarten who drew square-butted horses with curly tails and Egyptian eyes. I began to draw horses like hers and that made us friends until someone stole my friend's affections by adding bows and ribbons to her own horse drawings. I could've drawn bows and ribbons too, but it wasn't something that made any sense to me as an artist. How did the ribbon get there? Horses can't put ribbons in their own manes. Where's the person putting in the bow and how would you draw him or her? While I was trying to figure out the repercussions of tail and mane adornment, my friend drifted away from me. The obvious lesson here was that friendship was fleeting, something I already knew. Or maybe it was that sometimes you just have to accept people as they are and not expect them to always make sense.

But lately things are looking up on the friendship front. I joined a homeschooling group back in August so once a week I'm surrounded by people as crazy about their children as I am about mine. I also have nodding acquaintances who I see nearly every day when I'm walking my dog. Admittedly I know more of the dogs' names than the humans who are with them, but we wave companionably to each other while determinedly keeping our animals on our own side of the street.

This past September I met a woman who has similar interests as me. She's homeschooling a daughter about my youngest son's age, and she likes to write but wishes she had more time to do it. Last month she passed along the location of a really great thrift store. I knew then that we were destined to become close. You know you have someone's trust when they declare out loud that old jewelry is the only kind worth wearing, that the pretty towel and candle holder in their kitchen used to be a gun rack, and that they're a sucker for sequined sweater sets for $4.99.

This new friend and I meet every full moon now for a "Beach Session" at a local park south of town. We bring folding chairs and hot tea and the latest updates on our children and husbands. The updating part can last several hours. Then we take out our flashlights and we read each other something we've written ourselves. It's my favorite part of the night, sharing a creative effort with a kindred spirit to the sound of the surf in front of us. I think about how the moon over our heads is shining on Ludington, too, and then home doesn't feel so far away. It's right here, with my friend.