Once more to the lake

We’re off, tomorrow, to the cabin we’ve rented–my boyfriend, his daughters, my sons, and I–for the last two years, and posting will be even scarcer than usual. I packed my house up yesterday in a rush–people came to see the house on short notice, and then showed up an hour late, just as I was pulling into the driveway congratulating myself for getting all my errands done during the hour I had to be out.  The day went swiftly downhill from there. I’d taken my car in, finally, because it had been leaking engine coolant for a couple of months (I’d been driving around with a gallon jug of the stuff, topping the tank off as necessary, but I thought I should probably have the mechanic check it out before the long drive north). Somehow, I’d convinced myself it was just a faulty hose, though my car (an old Volvo station wagon) has the delicate, expensive constitution of an overbred racehorse. It’s never just a faulty hose.

And lo and behold, it was the radiator itself, which needed to be replaced. It was also the front brakes, plus a hose here, a seal there, plus some other thing that seized up when they were fixing the brakes, and for some reason this pushed me over the edge. No one likes an eye-watering car repair bill. Yet the car is old, and must be repaired. It is nothing compared to the huge amount of money I spent getting the house re-structurally aligned and painted and re-floored and spiffed up and the roof repaired and the ceilings re-repainted and so on. I should have just taken it in stride. Instead, I felt for several hours as if someone’s invisible thumbs were pressing down on my windpipe. I had no choice but to fix the car–we were, after all, getting ready to drive away on vacation. It’s not like I had a tough decision about whether to put the old nag down. But for some reason I found this particular financial blow hard to take.

I told myself to shake it off, it’s only money. What would Pa Ingalls do? He’d say, Whatever must be done, shall be done cheerfully, and then he’d rebuild the house with his bare hands or march off several hundred miles to find work East, where the locusts didn’t ravage everything. I packed up the house and made it immaculate. The kids and I packed up the loaner car. Then we drove to the mechanic, I put the repair on my credit card, and we unloaded the loaner (fishing rods, bean bags, inflatable boat, paddles) and loaded our newly pimped ride and drove to my boyfriend’s apartment, where we arrived just in time for supper.

Now the four children are chattering and wandering around and getting ready and planning (plotting, really) what they’re going to do during the week by the lake. I made supper with the vegetables from my CSA, which everyone devoured, and we will get up at dawn tomorrow and drive north. I’m having some sort of neurotic attachment to the house that’s hard to shake–but I am sure it will evaporate once I’m truly away. In general my life is pretty easy, I think. But actually, at this point, I’m a mite strung out, and it occurs to me that–as a friend told me yesterday–I probably could use this vacation.

 

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