I am on an unexpected vacation.
It's spring break for the kids, and it turns out that the twinkie who does afternoon kennels wants extra work this week anyway. It's her last paycheck before the cruise that she and her husband are taking to celebrate their first anniversary. (The twinkie is twenty-one years old.) So,I was able to take a few days off. Thursday through Sunday, to be precise.
Four days off. In a row. Four straight days. This hasn't happened since I went back to work a year and a half ago.
It's lovely. The first day, I was so relaxed, I felt like I'd been given a sedative. I hadn't realized how much it was bothering me, having to get up and go over to that stupid place every single morning of my life.
Not having to go anywhere in the morning affects the night before, too. I will make a confession, here--I usually sleep in Lillie's bed. My official excuse is that she has been known to sleepwalk, and I caught her opening the back door in her sleep one night.
The real reason is that I just love snuggling up to my baby at night, even though my baby is now in elementary school. Francie and Amelia sleep in the next room, or maybe the same room, depending on how you look at it--the rooms were once two small bedrooms, and were turned into one larger room by someone who knocked out a doorway and replaced it with an open arch.
I lie down with Francie to get her to fall asleep, then move into bed with Lillie. Francie wakes up during the night and gets into bed with Amelia whenever she can get away with it. Kids just like to sleep with people, that's all, and they like to do so a lot longer than our standard Americanized wisdom allows. I won't still be sleeping with Lillie when she's twelve, or even ten. But if I can get away with it for now, by golly I'm going to.
I'm getting older. I'm not having any more babies. My time for snuggling with a little kid at night is running out, and that makes it all the more precious.
Bedtime is usually the best part of my day. Francie is asleep, finally. Amelia is in bed. A book on tape is playing quietly in the background, "Talking to Dragons," or "Thimble Summer." Our kids have always fallen asleep to books on tape.
The dogs have been fed, been watered, been out, and are safely in their crates for the night.
And finally, finally, I get to go to bed.
I lift up the edge of the covers and slide in next to Lillie. There's an open window right by the bed, on my side, and the breeze is a cool spring breeze, almost chilly. When I slide under the covers, I enter the pocket of warm, body-temperature air that surrounds Lillie, who is a solid, slightly damp, breathing lump of child. It's delicious. It actually makes me a little giddy, a little giggly--the remnants of the baby hormones kicking in, I think.
Then comes the best part. I get to read in bed.
I had some stuff on hold at the library, and Fred picked it up for me. The house is sort of clean, for a change. It's spring break, and we don't have much scheduled. The continual, daily 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. deadlines are missing, this week.
So, once the kids are asleep, it's just reading.
I rarely wander the library, looking for books. Instead, I look at book catalogs and Amazon.com book reviews, find stuff that sounds good, check online to see if the library has it. If they do, I put it on hold.
This time, I had decided to work my way through some more of Jon Katz's books. I'd read "A Dog Year" and "A Good Dog." (Actually, I now own the library copy of "A Good Dog," because our shiba inu chewed on a corner of the book and we had to pay for it. The librarian got a kick out of that one.)
When Fred brought home my reserved books and dumped them on the kitchen table, I found that I had: by Jon Katz: "Geeks," "Running to the Mountain," "The New Work of Dogs," and "Izzy and Lenore." I also had "The Graveyard Book" by Neil Gaiman.
As it turned out, I hit the jackpot with this batch. Immersed in dogs, I can get tired of the subject. Two of the Jon Katz books were prior to his dog-writing days. I read "Geeks" first, and loved it. Then I went on to "The Graveyard Book," a different sort of children's book which was nevertheless quite the page-turner.
Then, "Running to the Mountain." I never heard of Thomas Merton before, and I'm afraid I don't especially care for him since reading this book. Although I got only glimpses of what his life and writing must have been like, I'm thinking the guy needed a baby to take care of so he could get some perspective and quit brooding.
But I liked the rest of the book. Surprisingly, at about the point where Katz is getting the yard cleaned up in his mountain retreat, I started to pine (no pun intended) for a mountain retreat of my own. I didn't even realize I wanted one, until then.
I know that it's ridiculous, a character flaw probably, to find yourself in every book you read, to decide that yes! This is what I needed! In my own defense, I don't think the whole mountain cabin thing is quite like that, for me.
I am a loner. I have always been a loner. I got married and had six kids so I wouldn't have to reach out to the world, because I'm no good at it. The world surrounds me by default.
However, I think that once the kids are grown, once I am over the hormonally-driven desire of youth for friends and family, I will return to being a loner, this time contentedly. In high school, not being able to talk to the popular kids is a failure. As a mom, not being able to chat up the Room Mother Moms is not something that bothers me for myself, but I feel guilty for not being that kind of parent for my kids. As an older person whose kids are on their own, I think I'll be relieved to put all that behind me. I think I'd love to have my own little house somewhere, just me and a couple of dogs. And a cat, for the mice.
As it is now, I don't have my own space at all, at all. I clean the whole house. I decorate the whole house. I organize drawers, closets, I pick out paint colors. Fred doesn't get in my way for all that stuff. So how can I say I don't have my own space?
Well, no part of it is mine, just mine, to use. In my desire to make everything fit, to give Fred enough space so that he doesn't resent us all, to give the kids the space that they need, my space has become expendable.
I have given over the "master" bedroom--a small room without its own bath, as is necessary for the master bedroom when you have lots of kids in the house--to Fred. He calls it his Man-Cave. The kids go in there when he's gone, watch TV, and leave cereal bowls and shoes lying around. He hollers. But I stay away from the room, mostly, leaving it to him. It's gradually becoming a slightly neater version of his college apartment, with everything from his allergy tablet bottles to his socks to his tool kit OUT instead of put away, so he can get to it all easily, I guess.
My shirts hang at one end of the girls' closet. My other clothes are in a dresser in their room. I sleep anywhere and everywhere, my favorite sleeping place being snuggled next to Lillie, on the fold-out couch that serves as her bed, right next to the window. It's my spot--but it's only my spot when no one else is using that room, or using the room next to it through the archway, or coming to find me because they want something.
So, the space on the window side of the sleeper couch becomes totally mine when: everyone is asleep. The dogs have gone out, have been fed and watered, and are in their crates for the night. All is quiet.
Then I can snuggle into my warm space next to Lillie. I open the window a crack. From my spot, I can reach out my right arm and touch the window screen. The sweet spring breeze wafts across the bed, and with the window within arm's length, I can adjust it however I want, depending on how cold I get. I might have a drink and some cookies balanced on the arm of the couch. Pillows propped behind me, just right. If my feet get cold, I move them further into Lillie's pocket of warmth. The dogs rustle in their crates. Through the open window, I hear the local owl hooting.
I have four days off. No alarm clock to set. No calculating in my head just when I will have to fall asleep by in order to make it through the next day. I turn on my flashlight--I read in bed by flashlight, like a kid sneaking books under the covers--and I read as late as I want to. Since the books showed up on Tuesday, I've finished three of the Jon Katz books and "The Graveyard Book."
I know there are people who vacation in Paris, attend parties in Manhattan, climb Mount Everest, bike across the country. I guess I'm kind of a dud, but I can't imagine anything more blissful than the night I just described--a pile of good books, an open window in spring, and a bed warmed by a sleeping child who loves me. It doesn't get any better.
