Category Archives: Travel

Quick post

20 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Randomness, Tassamara, Travel, WIP

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For the past three months, I’ve written some… but I’ve also worried that my plan to live in a camper and write a lot was maybe not really going to work out. Because living in a camper is great, I adore it, but the temptations are endless, far more so than living in a house (where I was also not getting enough writing done!)

There’s always some new place to see, some new adventure on the horizon. And I’m not talking about big adventures — whitewater rafting or mountain-climbing — but little adventures. Taking the dogs to a new dog park, spending an hour exploring a new grocery store, finding a way to get my laundry done. And also, of course, visiting people and spending time with them instead of staring at my computer.

However, my plan to sit still for ten days and bore myself into writing has been working incredibly well. I am really happy with what I’ve accomplished with Grace. Lesson learned: I’ve now scheduled the next several weeks and they’re not going to be adventurous. Until Grace is finished, I’m going to sit in Serenity. But I’ll be living in Tassamara, at least in my imagination, and really, it’s a pretty darn fun place to be.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be back at this campground: it’s basically a parking lot and there are a lot of parking lots in the world to explore. No need to stay at the same one twice. But apart from the wonderful dog park, which we have visited every single day, I’ve really loved walking in the dark here. It’s the time of year — it takes forever to get light in the morning, so I’ve been walking Z before sunrise and it’s getting dark early, so I’ve also been walking her in evening darkness. But it’s been incredibly beautiful. The moon was fantastic the past few days, so bright, and the sky was clear enough to see stars, not by the hundreds, alas, but at least by the dozens. In the early morning walks, I cast multiple shadows on the ground, moonlight shadows and streetlight shadows and shadows from lights showing up in trailer windows.

When I write my Massachusetts stories with magic (someday, someday!), there will be at least one character who can send her shadows off to do odd jobs for her. And in a desperate moment, she will search for lights to create many shadows, and in another desperate moment, she’ll be trapped in darkness, unable to find a shadow anywhere.

Someday on this trip — maybe even before I make it to the Grand Canyon — I’m going to visit a place where I can see thousands of stars in the night sky. I want to have that moment of amazement and wonder, that hold-your-breath awe at the beauty that lurks above us all the time that we hardly ever get to see.

But today, I’m going to write some more Grace.

Vero Beach

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Bartleby, Grace, Pets, Travel, WIP, Zelda

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I’m attempting to bore myself into writing. So far… eh, it might be working, but if so, it’s going slowly. Maybe by Monday I’ll have made some real progress.

I’m staying at the same campground for ten whole days. And not a beautiful or fun or inspiring campground — a parking lot campground. In fact, when I first got here, I thought it was creepy as hell. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay even for two days, much less ten. The next day (aka yesterday) I realized the creepiness — a general impression of a ramshackle, disheveled ghost town — was the result of the hurricane. It’s actually been sort of fun to watch them clean it up, one stretch after another going from debris-strewn to neat and tidy.

Plus there is a lovely huge fenced field labeled a dog park. I’ve been working steadily during the past eleven weeks on improving the dogs’ stays and recalls and a big space gives them a chance to really practice. Alas, status quo remains: Z is a rocket scientist and B has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I tell Zelda to stay and she sits and trembles and waits as I get farther and farther away, until finally I turn and point at the ground and she barrels toward me at joyous hyper speed, her ears trailing behind her, as if she actually thought I might leave her behind. B, on the other hand, bounces along two steps after me no matter what I say or do. But hey, eight more days in this park gives us a lot of time to practice.

Especially because I’m trying really hard to not let myself do anything but write or knit. No reading, no television, no internet browsing. Walking dogs and any form of exercise, okay. Eating, yes (obviously!); planning and cooking elaborate meals, no. I’ve given myself permission to write anything so I’ve written lots of personal babble, but I’ve also done plenty of staring at Grace. And enormous amounts of daydreaming. I wish more of it was daydreaming about Grace, but at least some of it will work its way into future stories. I love lines of thoughts like “People who feel rejected do stupid things: if Fen felt rejected, I wonder what she would do? If you had magic and felt rejected, hmm…” And off my brain goes. It’s so nice to feel like my daydreaming might be useful.

My sister tells me that I write about Z a lot and rarely about B. I’m not actually sure that’s true but just in case she’s not the only one who wants to know how they’re doing with the traveling lifestyle…

B loves it madly. He is more energetic, more rambunctious, happier and bouncier than he has ever been. He gets adored in campgrounds: all small children instinctively gravitate to him and he takes their attention and sticky hands as his due. He has entirely stopped hiding under furniture and in closets, perhaps partially because there aren’t a lot of places to hide in Serenity, but he doesn’t even try anymore. Instead, he cuddles up next to me and suggests I pet him. And he’s looking great, too. People have commented that he’s lost weight and he might have, but he also just seems sleeker and shinier and healthier. And happier. In Massachusetts, I very confidently said, “B doesn’t play,” just as he tore across the room and grabbed a tennis ball ahead of Z before returning it to my uncle, tail wagging.

Z, on the other hand… I think she likes parts of it. She likes our morning walks. She likes exploring new places, sniffing new smells. But it also seems to stress her out more than I expected it to. She’s gotten even pickier about her food, often rejecting her kibble entirely, and she’s seriously clingy. She’s always been a very attached dog — the feeling is mutual, I’m very attached to her, too — but her level of worry that I might disappear entirely seems to have increased. As long as she’s touching me, she’s calm, but she seems more high-strung and anxious than she used to be. Her separation anxiety isn’t manifesting as destructiveness, thankfully, but it’s hard to leave her. Although now that I’m analyzing this, she has adjusted to Serenity as home. She’s fine about being left in Serenity now. She’s just not fine about being left in other people’s houses, which I’ve had to do because it’s been too hot to leave her in the van when I can’t run the AC. Hmm, so I just need to go to colder climates to keep the dog happy. Works for me. 🙂

But not until I finish writing Grace, so I had best get back to it!

Ten weeks

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in RV, Serenity, Travel

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In the past ten weeks, I have camped in twenty-two different places. (I think.)

    One state park.
    One Harvest Hosts farm.
    One parking lot.
    One KOA.
    Two independent campgrounds.
    Four Passport America parks.
    Five Thousand Trails.
    Seven driveways.

Those are definitely not in any meaningful order.

I loved the state park — if it had come later in my journey, I would have loved it even more because I would have realized how incredibly nice it was.

The Harvest Hosts farm was amazing, one of the best days, best experiences, of my first ten weeks.

The parking lot was interesting. As parking lots go, it was nice, but I suspect camping in parking lots is not going to be a huge factor in my life. I have never felt more “woman traveling alone” than when I was awake at 3AM with the street lights shining in my windows. I’m not sure I can relax enough to start enjoying your average Walmart parking lot anytime soon. Maybe, though.

The campgrounds — from KOA (pricey) to Thousand Trails (free – $3/night) — were an incredibly mixed bag. Some were lovely. The Onion River Campground in Vermont was so peaceful, such a pleasant place to stay. But the Thousand Trails in upstate NY — the one where I had the hostile neighbors — was the only place in my journey that I’ve been grateful and eager to leave behind.

The seven driveways have been by far my favorite places to stay. I didn’t expect that at all. I thought driveways would be sort of uncomfortable, occasional places to stay. But Serenity has enough solar power that unless I need air-conditioning to keep the dogs comfortable, it’s really easy to stay in a driveway. Also reasonably private, usually pretty quiet, and cozy. And sociable. In fact, I really didn’t expect how sociable moving into a camper would be. I figured I’d be very isolated — plenty of time to do lots of writing — but not so much.

Today I’m in C’s driveway. She gave me a key to her house and told me I should count her driveway as home base while I’m in central Florida — it made me seriously teary. I absolutely love what I’m doing, no question, no uncertainty. But I do have moments when I feel… well, homeless. Floating, untethered, Mary Poppins-like drifting where the wind blows. Sometimes I love that. Sometimes, not so much. I’m not going to move into C’s driveway for a long stay anytime soon — I’ve got lots of places to go — but it feels like safety to know that the option is there.

Magical Vermont weekend

29 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Travel

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Vermont is exactly the way I imagined it would be. Well, summer time in Vermont. I also imagine that it’s cold and grey and wintery and snowy, and it is none of those things. But it is green and peaceful and beautiful, with long stretches of empty roads and farms around every corner.

My first night I stayed at a Harvest Hosts site, a farm in New Haven, Vermont, right outside of Middlebury. I picked up a sale book that day, Second Chance Dog: A Love Story, and read it sitting under a tree, with corn fields before me and fields spreading out on all sides. I ate heirloom tomatoes and exotic cucumber with cheddar cheese, walked the dogs along a gritty white gravel road, and when I went to sleep — early! — I could see hundreds of stars from the window next to my bed.

In the morning, I went into Middlebury and wandered around with the dogs, feeling nostalgic for my own New England college town, and then drove off onto the craziest road. Rte 17. There was a sign that said something like not advised for trucks in bad weather, but it wasn’t bad weather. But the road was terrifying and entertaining in equal parts. Curvy, steep, and seriously bumpy. Things were crashing around in the back of the camper — I was pretty sure it wasn’t a question of what was broken, but how much was broken, but hey, that’s what happens when you bring your vintage china camping with you! — but the views and scenery were incredible.

My cousin C. called when I was on the road, so when I saw a place to park, I pulled over to call her back. I decided to eat lunch there and my random, by-the-side-of-the-road parking lot turned out to be an access point to a river. Or maybe it was a creek? I took the dogs down a flight of wooden stairs to a rocky beach and we sat on the beach and ate melon and prosciutto and then did some wading. Even B tried out the water, although that might have been because he knew I still had prosciutto. It was hot, probably in the low 80s, with the sun beating down, and the water — at wading level anyway — was pleasantly cool.

I was meeting C. at the Bread and Puppets Circus, which she promised me was the quintessential Vermont experience. More nostalgia for me — not for Vermont, of course, since I’ve never been here before — but for Santa Cruz. The Vermont crowd could have easily been transported to R’s alternative elementary school events in Santa Cruz and no one would have noticed a difference, except maybe for the lack of sand. The dogs were beautifully behaved, the weather hot and sunny, the performances fun and the people-watching excellent.

I never did find C., but she came and joined me at my campground. In a surprise torrential downpour — the classic late afternoon thunderstorm — we got take-out salad with delicious maple balsamic vinaigrette and maple barbecued wings from a jam-packed pizza place, Parker Pies, and brought them back to the camper to eat. We even set up the table and used it for the first time. Turns out no china had been broken over the perilous route 17 — the crashing had been all the contents of the medicine cabinet hitting the bathroom floor. And none of that broke, either.

I’m not sure what I’m doing next. I’ve got four days to play in Vermont/work on my book and then I’m spending the weekend with C. We’ll be going kayaking and visiting relatives, but I have so many possible options for the intervening days. Unfortunately, I forgot to close the windows before we went out to pick up dinner yesterday and everything in Serenity feels damp and cold this morning. Plus the freezer has frozen over again, which causes the door to fall off, so I’ll need to devote some time to fixing that today. And I woke up congested and sneezing and achy, most likely from cheese and tomatoes on Saturday. Alas. But it was still an incredibly nice weekend.

Wrong side of the bed

24 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Personal, Pets, Randomness, Reviews, Serenity, Television, Travel

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I woke up totally on the wrong side of the bed. Sort of literally, too — I find the longer of the twin beds feels like it works less well for me, for some reason. But mostly emotionally. Yesterday was a “wherever you go, there you are,” sort of day, in which I didn’t make healthy choices about food and exercise and how I spent my time, and today I get to pay the price.

Although, on a brief digression, Stranger Things, on Netflix… I spent about six hours yesterday downloading it in 5 minute increments because I don’t have high-speed internet, but I HAD to finish it. I saw the first four episodes at my brother’s house, as normal television, and yesterday I binge-watched the final four, in torturous slowness. It was still worth it. I would not ordinarily ever watch something labeled horror — it is so not my genre — but I knew nothing about Stranger Things before I started watching it, so I didn’t know it was horror. And yes, it gave me nightmares, so I retain my ridiculous sensitivity to scary television, but it was still worth it. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not going to spoil anything about it, but I will say that all the people who are raving about it are right.

Moving on… wrong side of the bed. I woke up crabby. Stiff, not feeling well, cranky, cold. But I had some nice texts with a friend and decided to change my day. I would walk the dog, find some quiet space in this overcrowded campground and appreciate nature.

Nope. That was not how it turned out. Z was far more interested in smelling people’s garbage than she was in having a brisk walk into the forest, and I wound up coming home from our walk more irritated then when I’d started. I was even mean to her, that’s how grouchy I was. (I took B for a walk and left her in the van, which I never do. She gets long solo walks, because he is slow and won’t walk very far and she needs more exercise, but whenever I take him out, I take her, too, because she can use all the exercise she can get.)

After I fed the dogs, I decided… again… that I would change my day. I would meditate. I would find peaceful serenity in the silence of the van.

Nope. I couldn’t get my brain to shut up. The dogs were being total pests, both trying to be on top of me at the same time. They could tell that I was in a bad mood, and they both think that’s the cure. They’re often correct, but it wasn’t working today.

So I decided I would journal out my frustration. It didn’t make me feel better. The roots of my irritation were too much my own fault. I did too much sitting yesterday, not enough walking. I did too much watching, not enough writing. I ate delicious gluten-free pizza — nightshades, corn, dairy, so multiple food triggers — and not enough good food. I deserved to feel crappy.

Nothing was going to change my mood.

But then I got lucky. Or unlucky, as the case might be, but I’m choosing to call it lucky. I got some new neighbors.

I already sort of hated this campground. It might be really nice if it had half the people in it or if I had three kids that I was hoping to entertain on a busy summer vacation, but as a spot to sit and write, it’s not exactly heaven. I could tell myself all sorts of things about how it could be worse, and it seriously could be much worse, but it is no Frances Slocum. It’s the kind of park where you can watch all television all day long and not feel guilty about it, if that makes sense. It’s the kind of park where the cars almost outnumber the trees. (<—Total exaggeration.) Yes, I am being curmudgeonly — people are having fun family vacations all around me and that’s a very nice thing but I wasn’t going to be one of them.

And then my new neighbors arrived and they are even more curmudgeonly than I am. In fact, they are way MORE curmudgeonly. They are angry. I’m not quite sure why they’re angry, but it involves a fair amount of bad language, words about calling lawyers, a sense of absolute grievance. I think it has something to do with the site they’re in. It’s not good enough for them? It’s missing something? But along with their anger about whatever is going on with the campground, he is the kind of guy who’s telling her to not ask stupid questions and to get that dumb look off her face. And of course, it’s a campground, so the only way for me not to be overhearing them would be to close up my windows and start my air-conditioner running.

Talk about getting immediate perspective. I feel incredibly sorry for them — especially for her, of course — but I am also really grateful not to be them. They might be the kind of people who enjoy having grievances. Maybe complaining satisfies them. Maybe living in that emotional space feels comfortable and normal to them. But for me, it was the spur I needed to get out, to eat something healthy, to do a little stretching, to snuggle my dogs, to change my day.

The sun is shining and life is good.

A tale of two bridges

22 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Randomness, Serenity, Travel

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The campground I stayed at for the past couple of days, Council Cup Campground in Wapwallopen, PA, was rich in bridges. (Is that not a great town name? I keep wanting to say it aloud, just for the fun of it. Wapwallopen.) It was an interesting place, a very strange mix of new and old, arty and… well, skeezy.

I nearly didn’t stop when I drove by because there was a trailer with a confederate flag flying, which is a pretty clear indicator of it not being my kind of place. But I’d made a reservation and the camp office looked professional, with a AAA sign and a sign for the laundry, so I gave it a try. Some of the trailers were filthy — covered in dirt, looking like they hadn’t been moved in decades, surrounded by junk. Even wire fences around them, which to me always feels like an indicator of a dangerous neighborhood. But the playgrounds were fantastic and plentiful, the people were friendly, the camp store was nice with a great selection of kids’ toys, and it was possible to walk deep into the forest, into total solitude and quiet.

And it had bridges! Lots of bridges, because a creek ran through the campground. Supposedly, there was a waterfall, too, but I never found it. The creek was just a few yards wide — nothing like a small river, like the last creek I was near at the Gettysburg Farm campground. This one was shallow, running fast, over rocks, and as soon as I saw the first bridge, I knew we were walking over it.

a bridge

It was just that sort of bridge. Made of iron, but with gaps, like a grid of metal. I was not thinking of the dogs, though, until we got a little ways onto it and B refused to move. Oh, my, I’m laughing even at the memory, even though poor B was probably not amused and poor Z was definitely not amused later. Anyway, B could see that there was nothing underneath him to hold him up. It wouldn’t have been a long fall, only a couple of feet, really, but he was not going anywhere.

At that point we were not so far across, and I should have turned back, but Z was doing okay, so I picked B up and carried him. But then Z realized that she could fall through the gaps, when she did on one leg. She was scooting along, almost on her belly, inching forward, ears back, eyes wide. I wound up carrying B out to the end of the leash, going back and picking her up, carrying her out to the end of the leash, then going back and picking B up, hip-hopping the length of the leash, all the way across… we must have looked ridiculous.

I got a little anxious that Z might hurt herself when both of her back feet went through the holes in the grid on our last section and then I was worried, too, but we made it across, both dogs totally weirded out and giving me looks. It was terrible, but also terribly funny.

Our other bridge was much safer, but even sillier to cross. I’d walked out into the woods, searching for the waterfall, and I was so deep that I felt alone in the wilderness. There were tables, lots of picnic tables, for tent camping spots, but not a single tent anywhere to be seen. It was beautiful and a little spooky. When I saw a bridge of course I crossed it, because hey, bridge. But the path started to disappear afterwards and I kept going.

Bridge2

I kept thinking about the woman found in the woods, just a mile or so away from the trail that she’d lost. Dead for months before she was found, like she sat down and waited to be rescued and waited too long. It was probably good for me to be thinking of her, because I kept glancing over my shoulder, locking landmarks into my memory for when I gave up on the waterfall and turned back the way I’d come. Which, of course, I finally did, although mostly because I stumbled upon civilization in the form of houses and knew that wherever the waterfall was, it wasn’t the way I was going.

I love the way you can feel alone in the wilderness and then, oops, houses. That’s probably my kind of wilderness, the kind where help is actually easy walking distance away. I’m really not the wilderness type — I like the illusion of it better than reality.

Other things: I’m still going to post about sheets soon, but I’m sort of annoyed with myself for already spending so much time on this blog post — I had some major digressions about how confederate flags offend me and wire fences make me uneasy, which I deleted because boring, plus posting the images took forever because slow internet, but it’s almost 11 and I only have another hour to write today before I head to New Jersey. And then tomorrow is a long driving day.

Normally that would not matter at all, but for the last couple of days — between adventures on bridges and the Wapwallopen Peach Festival, where I bought peach jalapeño jam and cranberry cherry jam — Grace has been going really well. I’m almost scared to write that for fear I might jinx it, but… yeah. It’s pretty darn exciting to be enjoying writing Grace. I hope it lasts!

The interesting stuff…

19 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Mom, Personal, Travel

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I walked Zelda this morning into a scene of such stunning beauty that I was glad I’d left my cell phone back in Serenity. If I’d had it with me, I would have tried to capture the moment and I would have failed, because I don’t know how to take good photos, and it would have been just another generic pretty scenery picture. But the full moon was still up, in a sky that had wisps of sunrise clouds, a very subtle pink and twilight purple, in an otherwise overcast white. Mist was rising off water that looked a deep dark rippling green and in the distance, the hills… rolled. An artist could have drawn the classic three intersecting lines that anyone would recognize as hills in the distance and it would have been those exact three hills. It wasn’t bright, it wasn’t showy, but it was so beautiful I had to hold my breath, as if breathing would shatter it.

I’m in Frances Slocum State Park, in Pennsylvania. I came here because it was the closest camping spot to a cemetery I wanted to visit. Yeah, with the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore on my list of places to see, as well as the entire country of possibilities, my first destination was a graveyard. Ha.

But I’ve had my mom’s ashes sitting on my closet shelf for about four years now. She died five years ago and at the time I thought we’d get together and do some family thing with her ashes after a suitable time had passed. I don’t know what exactly — take them out to sea, maybe? On a cruise? She would have loved that, if the whole family had gotten together and gone on a cruise in celebration of her. But instead my dad remarried. There’s an interesting awkwardness to not being finished with your first wife’s business when you already have a second wife, or at least so it seemed to me, and my mom’s ashes became part of that.

Long story short, eventually they wound up with me, and I’ve let them sit, not knowing what to do with them. Her last remains. Except that they are so not her last remains. I am what remains of her. R is what remains of her. The scrapbooks she created, those are her remains. My sister, my brother, their kids, our memories… so much remains of her. And these ashes, they’re not important, not really. But I did want to dispose of them respectfully. Even, I guess, lovingly. If there is any possibility that my mom’s spirit is connected in any way to the pile of grey dust that was her body, I wanted her to be happy with what happened to that dust.

That brings me to the cemetery I was looking for. My great-grandmother is buried there, and I thought it would be nice to scatter my mom’s ashes there. She loved her grandmother and treasured her memories of visiting her grandmother’s farm when she was little. I wish I had any idea where the farm was because that would have been perfect (barring the extreme discomfort of asking someone if they’d mind if you scattered ashes on their property and/or the great likelihood that it’s some kind of housing development now…) but the cemetery was the best I could do.

It was lovely. Beautiful, green, serene. Gorgeous and old. Also surreal. I wandered through the gravestones looking for the right one — Myrtle Smith, with Paul Smith next to her — and instead finding, with vague shocks of recognition, everyone else. My grandfather’s parents. My grandfather’s sister. My other great-grandparents. My great-great grandparents. Plenty of strangers’ names, of course, but down every line, another Smith, Rozelle, Lewis, Labar, and Hahn. It was eerie and charming and sort of heart-wrenching. I looked at what I was pretty sure was my great-grandparents’ gravestone — Grover Cleveland and Jessie Labar — and knew almost nothing about them. I recognized their names but that was it.

In the end, I did find the right grave and sprinkled a handful of my mom’s ashes there. I didn’t anticipate how emotional I would feel about it, how much it would bring my grief back to me and how sharp that pain would be. The dead always outnumber the living in a cemetery, but being alone there, surrounded by my forgotten relatives, was… hard.

Afterwards, I drove into the town, West Pittston, looking for the houses where my mom had grown up. I had an idea of discreetly sprinkling more of her ashes, I think — but the streets were narrow and the idea of parking was terrifying and navigating was a challenge — Z is just not good at reading maps for me and my GPS is always a little late — so I came back to the campground and settled in.

Fortunately, the park is beautiful. The campsites are shaded by trees, with screens of trees separating one site from the next. It’s been rainy and muddy, but very peaceful. (With the minor exception of my poor neighbors not having much success handling their whiny kids. The dad’s exasperated, “What am I supposed to DO with her?” had me wincing in sympathy.)

I suspect the reason people think of the ocean when it comes to ashes is that there’s actually quite a bit of them — a handful can be scattered elegantly but dumping out the whole bag just seemed very not cool. Both not respectful and also leaving a mess for the person next mowing the lawn to be disturbed by. Maybe if you can hurl them off a mountaintop, the wind would carry them away, but my image of gently scattering dust does not match the reality of a heavy duty plastic bag with a mound of ashes in it.

Still, I’ve taken many long walks here, including one where I went fairly far off a trail into the woods and found a nice young tree that looked like it might benefit from some nutrients at its roots. I don’t know how my mom would feel about that — she wasn’t much of a nature person. She preferred her camping to include comfortable beds and flush toilets.

But I kept some of the ashes. I’m not sure why. I thought I was ready to let go, but maybe not. It’s definitely one of those times when logic is warring with intuition, though. Logic is saying “Storage! Trees, nutrients!” but my intuition is telling me that there’s something else I need to be doing. For most of my life — all of my life — logic would have won, but not today. Maybe I’ll visit my grandparents’ graves while I’m at this. Or maybe I’ll bring the ashes to the Grand Canyon with me. I wonder how many people do that? I bet lots. It seems like that kind of place. Or maybe I need to let my siblings have their own experiences with saying goodbye in that way. I’m really not sure, but what’s left of her ashes comes with me.

Anyway, at the moment, I’m sitting in a grocery store parking lot, wishing I still had a grill. Wondering if I should buy firewood. Trying to think of some food plan for the next few days and mostly eating spice drops, currently my worst food vice. Today and tomorrow I’m floating around PA and on Monday, I’m headed into NJ for the day. Next week, NY, and the week after that, Vermont.

Practical angst

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Personal, Pets, Randomness, RV, Serenity, Travel

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I bought my coconut milk in haste at the store the other day and it is vanilla-flavored coconut milk, instead of normal coconut milk. It is, to put it in a nutshell, disgusting. It is making me sad when I drink my coffee and I refuse to contemplate what it might be like on cereal. I ought to throw it away, find myself a new grocery store, and buy myself some new coconut milk, but the last “coconut milk” I bought was half almond milk, half coconut, and it was also disgusting. I did throw it away. Throwing away two almost full half gallons of milk-like substance feels so wasteful.

Plus, that time, the store didn’t have any regular coconut milk. I’m currently in a place that could be safely described as middle-of-nowhere, and I’m wary of heading out on a drive to a grocery store that might be half an hour away only to discover when I get there that it doesn’t have coconut milk. The obvious solutions occur to me — GPS nearby grocery stores, find their numbers, call them up and ask! — but I currently have no internet, so even that solution means packing up for a drive to find myself some connectivity.

Obviously, by the time you’re reading this, I will have done so, because ha-ha, posting to my blog also requires internet, but at the moment I’m feeling very disinclined to get on the road. It rained last night, gloriously heavy, so that the pounding of drops on the roof of Serenity was like living inside a maraca. And I totally have to google that word, because I’m not sure whether I’ve got the name right, but again… no internet.

So yeah, living inside a maraca, or if that’s not the right word, one of those instruments you play with as a kid, a gourd filled with seeds that you shake like a baby’s rattle. I wasn’t being shaken, but the sound was that fast, heavy rattle. It was lovely. But I had decided when last I looked at the sky that the overcast white wasn’t gray enough to bring real rain, so I left my chair and my towel and my purple-striped Mexican blanket outside.

They are well beyond damp.

I don’t want them inside Serenity.

Honestly, I don’t even want to touch the blanket. I put it down for the dogs because the ground here is hard gravel and dirt, with some puddles of mud, and I didn’t want them — Zelda especially — to choose the mud puddles as the comfiest place to get cozy. Zelda would. Bartleby also likes to roll in the dirt, but not with the same abandon. He’s not a huge fan of baths and he’s much more sensitive about the possibility of scolding. Z likes baths and she’s seldom been scolded so she luxuriates in the dirt, then comes in and goes straight to the tub. With no tub, I don’t know what she’d do, but tracking mud all over my bed has never bothered her, so I’m pretty sure it would involve me needing to do laundry. I guess I’m going to have to do that anyway, since the blanket might never be clean again. But at least after it dries I ought to be able to shake off some of the dirt and fold it up, so it’s out of the way until I manage to find a washer. My sheets, on the other hand… well, sheets are turning out to be a saga of their own.

Dirt in general is turning out to be an interesting aspect of living in a camper. I’m not a dirt-phobe. Good thing, because campgrounds are dirty and dogs track in dirt and living partially outside and otherwise in a very small space means that there is dirt. I was showering yesterday in my cute little bathroom and the floor was muddy. Not just from my dirty feet, but because I have to stash outside stuff on that floor when I’m on the move. The power cords and water hose lie on the ground outside while I’m parked and when I’m putting them away for a drive (“away” being defined as “on the bathroom floor”), I’m not worrying about the fact that they’ve picked up dirt and bits of leaf debris and grass. Generally speaking when I go camping and things get dirty, I think, well, I’ll get it clean when I get home. Except this is home.

I thought my solution would be to wipe them dry with a towel as I rolled them up to stow them away but at the end of that process, I have a dirty towel. And towels — well, towels are causing me almost as much angst as sheets.

Yesterday the radio hosts on a show I was listening to were debating how many times one should use a towel before washing it. There was an actual, honest-to-goodness argument for once. Dry yourself with a towel one time and then wash it. Um, no. I brought five standard towels with me and I’ve jettisoned two of them to take back the storage space they were using. I brought four or five dish towels with me, and that turns out to be not nearly enough. Drying dishes, wiping spills, cleaning hands after cooking, drying hands, wiping off dogs’ feet and bellies after coming in from a walk… at that point, the towel goes in the laundry bag and before I know it, I’m out of dish towels, and nowhere close to needing to do laundry for anything else.

Except maybe sheets. My sheets are causing me some serious angst, but I need to eat breakfast and get moving — and I can’t believe I haven’t written about the more interesting stuff that’s going on! — so more on sheets and sleeping later. And also the interesting stuff.

The eye of the beholder

15 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Depression, Personal, Randomness, Travel

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fungus

I suffer from the relatively common ailment of mean brain. Not mean to other people, but mean to myself. It’s something I’ve worked on for a long time, but I still have flare-ups. Maybe it’s like an allergic reaction? My hyperactive immune system thinks that half the common substances on the planet are dire threats and stimulates misery in response. When my mean brain gets triggered, it stimulates misery, too. Maybe it’s some kind of protective mechanism, but it’s not a very good one.

Sunday morning, it started whispering. I’ll spare myself writing out the details — it’s not like it’s going to be good for me to spend more time in those thoughts — but the words “homeless” and “failure” were pretty loud. Fortunately, I was in a really good place to see those thoughts for what they were, just words. Just labels.

Earlier I had been sitting in my chair, watching the water and the trees and a chirpy little sparrow. The sparrow was adorable, totally charming in that tiny bird way. It kept a fearless eye on the dogs, but it was much more interested in whatever it was finding in the dirt. It flew away and I thought, “What a miracle birds are.” Flight is so amazing. It’s incredible that they can just lift off and soar through the air. It’s not a new thought, I’ve had it many times before, often when seeing birds take off around the pond where I used to walk the dogs. And then one of the nasty biting bugs landed on my leg and I thought, “Hmm, I don’t think I ever think about bugs being a miracle. But they can fly, too.”

I waved the bug off and moved on, heading inside to figure out what I could eat for breakfast. The campground I was in was a first-come, first-served campground, and I was reluctant to pack up to make another grocery store run while weekend people were coming in. My spot was lovely, a mix of sun and shade, looking right out on the water, with a pretty view of an open field on the other side. It was also nice and flat with no major ruts or big muddy spots, easy to get to, and reasonably simple to access. In other words, I was afraid to leave it for fear I’d lose it. But food supplies were running low. Still, I made myself breakfast from the dregs of the fridge. And when it was ready, I took a picture of it, because it was very pretty.

salad photo

As I sat down to eat, I was thinking about reality and how we shape it with our words. Here’s a reality: my nectarine was bruised. I had to cut out the bruised bits. My cucumber was a tasteless grocery store purchase, no flavor at all. The radishes, from the farmer’s market two weekends ago, never tasted very good and were getting squishy. I threw the rest of them away when I was done with my salad. The carrots are the kind that seemed old the instant I opened the bag, slightly bitter and drying out. The salad greens are still remarkably nice given that they’re a week old, but they’re heavy on some grassy thing which I’m not nuts about. One of my three remaining eggs was cracked, so I had to throw it away. As a result, I only had one egg on my salad, so I could save the second one for later when I would be hungry again.

Here’s another reality: the egg was perfectly cooked and delicious. Still warm, it peeled easily and the yolk was exactly right. (Go, insta-pot!) I made a dressing to go on the salad that was fantastic — mayo that is gluten-free, soy-free, egg-free, and dairy-free (aka, miracle mayo), plus olive oil, lemon juice and powdered ginger. It made the cucumbers delicious, the carrots tolerable, couldn’t help the radishes, was interesting on the nectarine, and was amazing on the egg and the greens. I didn’t quite lick the plate, but I ate every last bite of the whole salad, even the grassy stuff.

And maybe those thoughts about reality and how we shape it were the trigger for me being mean to myself, but before I could do more than take two or three nasty swipes at my choices and my character, I caught sight of the image at the top of this post. Such a bright color, almost like a California poppy. And the curves of the stalks are like petals on a flower.

But it’s a fungus. A fungus growing out of the picnic table where I was eating. Ick. Gross. And yet… it really was beautiful in the sunlight.

When my mean brain triggers, my eyes stop seeing the beauty around me. And in me, too. They start labeling: bugs, fungus, homeless.

It is a reality that I have moments when I feel homeless, not adventurous. Three weeks ago, I had a perfect last day in my house, and the memory is bittersweet right now. I miss my pool. I miss my shower. I desperately miss my high-speed, always-on Internet connection! And it’s painful to be homesick for a home that you never get to go back to.

But my mean brain is not running this show. It’s also a reality that I feel incredibly lucky. My salad was no different, no better than any salad I could have had a month ago at any time… but I appreciated it more. A shift of the kaleidoscope wheel and the pieces are the same but the picture is changed.

Small adventures

11 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Personal, Serenity, Travel

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I had an adventure yesterday. I went to the grocery store.

Yes, that makes me laugh, too. But it sure felt like an adventure. Strange roads, following my GPS, managing the parking lot and running the generator and air-conditioner for the dogs, roaming the aisles of an unfamiliar store. I actually also stopped at a farm stand, run by a woman in Amish clothing, where I bought shallots and a squash and a cantaloupe.

I thought about going to a museum. According to Roadtrippers, the Agricultural and Industrial Museum was right down the road from the grocery store. (My Internet is so slow that I’m having trouble testing my links: apologies if those don’t work the way they should.) It felt like it would be virtuous to go to the museum, like it was something I should do.

But while I waited for my GPS to give me directions, I remembered two things. First, I’m not a tourist. My goal with living in Serenity is to have a simpler, more flexible life, not fill up my brain with factoids and miscellaneous places. I’m sure it’s a cool museum, but there’s no inherent virtue in adding another random place to my collection of inaccessible memories. Second, “should” is not the same as “want to.” When I took that mental step back, I realized that I’d really rather go back to the campground and sit under my awning and knit and think about Grace.

So I did.

Alas, nasty little stinging flies were chewing on my legs, so I didn’t last outside all that long. It lacks romance to admit that I retreated inside and hung out in the air-conditioned van for the rest of the day, but I did my Insta-Pot experimenting, some knitting, texted with friends, wrote a little and thought about resistance a lot.

If I was camping — say, on my one-week summer vacation from an office job, due back at work on Monday — I’d feel guilty for my wasted day. I could have been outside. I could have been kayaking. I could have been exploring the battlefields of Gettysburg, soaking in the history and tragedy of my location. But living in a camper is not the same as camping, and it wasn’t a wasted day.

In fact, today I think I will do pretty much the same thing. At the moment I’m sitting outside, listening to the noise of the bugs — so incredibly loud, beyond chorus levels and into rock symphonies — and watching the occasional wildlife. I’ve seen a chipmunk, so cute, squirrels and birds. I heard a big splash in the water, which gave me an instant surge of adrenaline before I remembered that murky water + splash doesn’t equal alligator in Pennsylvania. No idea what the splash was, but probably fish of some sort, since I didn’t see a bird. The flies are biting but not as badly as they were yesterday when it was hotter and I was sweatier.

My big adventure for today might be walking the dogs up to the field with the animals and seeing whether the brown creature I caught a glimpse of yesterday when I was driving in really is a baby alpaca.

Yesterday, I was joking with my friend Tim about facing the challenge of the grocery store. The thing is, going to the grocery store did feel like a challenge. I had to pack up Serenity for driving, unhook her from the electric and water, dump her tanks at the “sanitation station”, navigate unfamiliar roads, start the generator to run the AC to keep the dogs cool, check on my alert system for a temperature reading inside the van, park more carefully than I did… (I really need to remember that Serenity is tall — I again scraped her roof along trees, alas.) But it was exciting. And it was fun.

And I realized that I’m accomplishing (almost) exactly what I was vaguely, incoherently, hoping to accomplish. I’ve turned my life into an adventure, where even the small challenges, like going to the grocery store, require an eyes-wide-open approach, an appreciation of where I am and exactly what I am doing. My heart is beating. It’s a wonderful feeling.

It’ll be even better when I’m also writing again regularly. And that is going to happen. Maybe even today.