Missy Diggs

At various times in my life I have wished for the simplicity of a uniform. Coordinating outfits and deciding what to wear every day, sometimes more than once, are just so exhausting, and the results are not usually worth the effort.
However, aside from marching band, candystriping, and various waitressing jobs, I have never been too interested in participating in activities in which a uniform is required. If wearing a marching band uniform every Friday night in Texas doesn’t cure you of the willingness to let others (unknown others, but probably church ladies in the 1960s, judging from the choice of style and fabric) choose your uniform for you, I don’t know what would. Serving drinks at the Playboy mansion? Serving time in Arizona? Serving your country and your church at the same time in Mormon military underwear?

But I have often wanted to have a closet full of comfortable, beautiful, serviceable clothes, appropriate to my lifestyle, so that I could just reach in and pull out any outfit and look and feel right for any occasion. Maybe part of the problem is that my lifestyle is not uniform. The last few years have seen me chasing toddlers over pea graveled playgrounds in windy parks, sloshing through creek water up to my waist, waiting for hours in posh medical lobbies, dancing my ass off at 80s night, and so much more.
Then there’s my body. I’ve been the same height since approximately 1985 but everything else has changed dramatically, and many parts continue to change in surprisingly unpredictable ways. Add to that my unique set of “figure challenges” –long waist, short thick legs, wide rib cage– and dressing myself at all starts to seem like a logic problem from the old GRE.

Then there are my interesting and unique undergarment requirements, which I still don’t quite know how to describe, except to say that it seems to me that if you have to wear medically-necessary undergarments, someone somewhere should make some that you would actually want to wear. And that you could wear clothes over. Without looking like a nun who has escaped from a sanitarium in Germany, circa 1834. But if anyone does make those, I haven’t found them yet.
And so I am constantly experimenting with underwear solutions, which continues to complicate the clothing issue, because as any woman knows, not all underwear works under all clothes.
It’s exhausting. And honestly, even though I love clothes and fashion as a vibrant form of self-expression, I simply don’t want to be bothered with it anymore. I want to grab and go! I want to spend more time living my life than dressing for it! I want my clothes to float down over my body as if I were in a Caress soap ad from 1987!

And if I’m going to be honest, I have to admit that all of this is made even more complex by my unwillingness to pay retail. I mean, if you buy all your clothes at Savers, you’re bound to find something, but it’s probably not going to be a uniform. Unless you want to wear scrubs everyday, which actually is what I predict we will all be wearing in the not so distant future. That, or the unisex Chinese pajama sets of the Cultural Revolution.

So, since I obviously haven’t figured out a clothing uniform that will work for my body, my budget, my medical conditions, and my life, I thought I would start at the bottom. What I need, I think, is a Shoeniform®. You know, two or three pairs of shoes that take me where I need to go in maximum comfort and style, that I can just replace every year or so as needed. I’m spurred on by the fact that when I went to the chiropractor to get repaired after my car crash I learned that my right leg is significantly shorter than my left leg, and now I have to wear a heel lift on the right side to balance myself out. How I survived almost forty years of life, one knee surgery, three years of ballroom dance lessons, and two rounds of physical therapy for knee problems without learning of this discrepancy I’ll never know. But having shoes made with the appropriate heel lift is easier and more comfortable (though more expensive, and did I mention that I never pay retail?) than having to move that plastic insert every time you change shoes. And really, what do I need all these different shoes for anyway?

Living in Austin, the local Shoeniform® is probably this: flip-flops, cowboy boots, workout shoes. Though you do see a lot of this:

And also this:

The closest I have ever come to having a Shoeniform® was when I was pregnant, and I only had one pair of shoes that fit. They were made by Think! and they were kinda like this:

only prettier, cause they were patent leather and had rhinestones, and also more practical cause they had a more sensible sole. They were also the most expensive shoes I’ve ever owned, and I wore them until they fell apart, which took quite a long time, and actually theoretically they would have lasted longer because the company claims that you can get them resoled or whatever but in fact they stopped making the particular style that I loved and so I couldn’t find anyone who could actually resole them.

The only problem I can see with using these shoes as my Shoeniform® again is the price. Oh, and the pea gravel. And the fact that I will still probably be lusting after:

and these:

and these:

Not that they make these for my size (11WW, can you believe it?) or my budget (approximately $25).

This morning started out as many mornings do, with me feeling really groggy and already unable to keep up with the demands of one very Vivid Girl. I groaned my way out of bed, swallowed all the pills that go with the morning part of my lifestyle, brushed my teeth (wait! did I brush my teeth? um, well, I usually do brush my teeth…..), poured myself some coffee (many many thanks to Mr. B for getting up before me and making the coffee) and I put some breakfast in a bowl for the Vivid Girl, who was already barricaded on the couch with her craft supplies and her Netflix cartoons. But the Vivid Girl did not want the bowl of breakfast, even though I had carefully selected the items in the bowl to be pleasing to her. In this case, frosted organic tiny wheat cereal squares and dried apricots.
She loves these things, usually. Okay, well, actually, I can’t figure out what she loves usually, but I have seen her eat these very things before, on more than one occasion, and when I brought them home from the store she was excited, and so I foolishly thought that meant that when she was hungry she would eat them.
Because I never learn.
So, because I am the kind of parent who strives for joy more than for consistency or authority or even keeping the food budget down, I suggested that we could leave a bit early for camp today and drive through the fast food place where the Vivid Girl likes to order a breakfast that comes with a toy and that she can eat in the car. This is not something I am willing to do everyday, mind you, but somewhere along the way we came to a compromise in which we, the Worn-Out Parents of the Vivid Girl, agreed that we would do this once a week or so.
This made the Vivid Girl happy and so we quickly scrambled around pulling clothes and shoes on and off until we were both wearing what it seemed like we should wear, and we gathered up our things (my things: purse, keys, cell phone, kindle, wallet. her things: script, dancing shoes, socks, activity with many tiny pieces to do in the car), and we left the house. And we left another thing, too: we left the snack that the Vivid Girl needs for camp and that Mr. B had kindly packed while I was still pretending to be asleep this morning. We left that valuable item sitting on the kitchen counter. And we didn’t realize it until we actually got to camp, about half an hour later.
And by that time we were no longer early for camp, but right on time, which meant that there was no time to go back and get the snack. And the reason we went from being very early to having no extra time is this:
First we went to the fast food drive through that the Vivid Girl likes and she told me what to order. And what she likes to order now is actually a regular menu item, so I have to remember to also order the kids’ toy, for which they probably charge me extra even though they are already charging me full price for low quality food instead of the lower kids’ price for equally low quality food. And then the toy came and it was one that the Vivid Girl already has, from the last time she got fast food breakfast on the way to camp.
And maybe that is why when she unwrapped her food she decided she didn’t like it. She didn’t have to taste it to make this decision. She just looked at it. And she said it looked different. And she wrapped it up and set it aside and began to pout.
So I said, cheerfully and kindly,  “Well, did you taste it? maybe it looks funny but tastes okay?” Because now I was in the position of trying to encourage my child to eat food that I don’t want her to eat. Because that’s my parenting style.
So she tasted it, grudgingly, and then said it tasted pretty okay so she took two teeny tiny miniature bites of her full-sized low-quality fast-food breakfast sandwich, and then she said, petulantly, “But the meat looks kinda gray in the middle.”

She got me on that one. Even I am not going to try to convince my child to eat low-quality fast-food meat that I don’t even want her to eat in the first place if it’s GRAY. I mean, what even is it? Is it monkey or something? Why is it GRAY?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!

So I took a deep breath and drove in the direction of the Vivid Girl’s camp-of-the-week, and I asked, ever so sweetly, “Well, my darling daughter, what would you like to do about this situation?”

And the Vivid Girl threw back her head and wailed, “I DON’T KNOW!!!!”

So I said I would go to another, slightly higher-quality, fast-food drive-through on the way to camp so she could have something to eat before camp. Because you do need breakfast before camp, you know. Especially if you’re the Vivid Girl, and it’s your first ever acting camp, and you have been cast in the lead of the mini-musical, which is Annie, and which you have to be ready to perform in ONLY THREE MORE DAYS. So we went to the slightly higher-quality fast-food drive-through, which I had thought served breakfast, but it didn’t serve breakfast anymore. If ever. So finally I took the girl to a cafe where she was able to order real food. She chose a giant yogurt granola parfait with berries, of which she ate approximately three bites and then declared herself full.

By which time we were at camp, which is when we noticed that we had forgotten the snack, and she started to cry because now she was stuck either being late for camp or having no snack and what kind of terrible choice is that? So I took another deep breath, yoga-style, and pasted a smile on my tired twitchy face and said, “No, darling girl, light of my life, you go to camp on time and I will go to the nearest store and get you a snack and bring it back to camp so you will both be on time and have a snack.”

Which is what I did.

And so by 9:15 this morning, I had been to four different food sellers and had spent approximately $30 on 3 bites of food for a six-year-old. And I was exhausted. So I came home and did a few low-key things here until suddenly I noticed that it was 12:17 and I was running late for picking the Vivid Girl up from camp. Usually she wants me to have a snack all ready for her in the car when I pick her up, and today that would have been easy to do except that of course I ran out the door and left the snack that Mr. B packed sitting on the kitchen counter again.

And when I got to camp I was two minutes late, and there were three girls left, and one of them of course was the Vivid Girl. And she was crying. Because I was late. And in fact her teacher said she had just started crying, which makes sense because I had just started being late two minutes before. So I sat with the Vivid Girl and kissed her and comforted her and apologized for being late and assured her that I knew how much it upset her to be picked up late and reassured her that I will always come get her so there’s nothing to worry about. Then I dried her tears, and patted her hair, and gathered up all her stuff, including her street shoes, and her dance shoes, and her socks, and her script, and the bag that had contained the snack and which now contained a handful of soggy popcorn, an empty beef jerky package, and a half-full bottle of Vitamin Water with the cap off. The Vitamin Water spilled quickly filled the bag and the Vivid Girl sniffled and told me that when she had opened the jerky almost all the jerky had spilled out of the bag and so she hadn’t really had a very good snack at all.

And we walked out to the car and stowed all the stuff and  got buckled in. When I asked if she was ready to go, the Vivid Girl cheerfully said that she was. But as soon as I started driving, she started to sniffle and pout again. Once again I propped the corners of my mouth up into a sympathetic smile, turned my head, and said, “Oh, dearheart, lovely girl, whatever is the matter?”

And the Vivid Girl screwed up her eyes, opened her mouth wide, and howled, “I’m hungry!”

What I am doing right now is making eggplant/yellow squash parmesan using veggies from our bountiful farm box. More about the farm box some other time, and more about the vegan/not vegan issues brought up by cooking for my family in general, and making eggplant/whatever parmesan for my family in particular. Right this very minute I am sitting down to see what kind of blog update will come out of me while I am waiting for the salt to draw any potential bitterness out of the eggplant. I am not salted, so hopefully what comes out of me will be some flavor other than bitter.

I’ll tell you right now, though: I’m not promising sweet.

It’s summer here, as it is in many places, though certainly not all. Summer means no school, which in the case of our very own Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, means three long months yearning for school. In the case of the dedicated and loving mamas of this Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, it means three long months of periodic fun, punctuated by guilt, tied up together with yearning for school. Mothering seems to have a lot of guilt built in, on one side of the equation or the other, and these days it seems to be the mamas who feel guilty (rather than the mamas making the children feel guilty, which was popular for a long time), and one of the things I find myself feeling guilty about is my inability to give my child the kind of summer I used to have. But during the school year, the guilt is so much lighter and smuggier because I know for sure that I am giving the Vivid Girl a school so much better and more life-affirming than the ones I had.
But right here, at the point of summer that is farthest from school, the guilt is at a max and the smugginess (though not the mugginess) is at a seasonal low.

To counterbalance that, and also to get myself out of the house and away from certain chores such as thinking of family-friendly ways to cook the vegetables in the farm box, I took the Vivid Girl to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
Grandma and Grandpa live in what used to be a teeny-tiny rural town north of Dallas. To get to their house from Dallas, you drive north on the highway, drive east on a road that turns into a road with the same name as the town, and turn left at the little gas station/food mart/feed store. The sign on this store says:

Bait
Sandwiches

which is why I don’t go to that store. Also, my mom says it smells funny in there, though she allows that maybe that is because of the feed store aspect of the many conveniences offered by this store.

I am sure this store was much more convenient to the few people of the small town back when it was a small town, but now they have Walgreens, Petsmart, Target, and Jimmy Johns between them and the highway. Still, the bait sandwich business seems to be good, as the store is still there, unlike the junk store across the street that also used to mark the turn. Where I also never went, despite the fact that I love nothing more than shopping for junk, because I was never really sure whether it was actually a store, or just a house with a whole lot of stuff in the yard.

Anyway, turn left at Bait Sandwiches and turn left again and there you are. If you get to the lake, you’ve gone too far.

But even though I know how to drive to my parents’ house, I usually don’t actually drive there. Me and the Vivid Girl, we like to take the train. We get on the train in Austin, ride 6 hours or so to Dallas, with all stops in between, and then get on the MetroRail and take it as far north as it goes. Then we climb into the back of Grandpa’s pickup truck and he carries us the rest of the way. The Vivid Girl likes the train because she can walk around, do crafts, practice cup stacking in the lounge, and buy snacks.  When we travel in the car, she needs to do all these things too, but we usually aren’t getting any closer to our destination while she does them.

The Vivid Girl also loves the train because she gets a whole day of my completely undivided attention. If  only for this reason, the Vivid Girl would probably ride the train every day if she could.  All day every day. Though I am pretty sure that the quality of my attention is at its very best on Day 1, and might devolve into something quite unpleasant before we reached such a distant destination as Chicago or Los Angeles. Probably it would be best to just ride the same stretch of rail between Austin and Dallas, so we could be rescued and revived by the people who love us at either end. Even so, I’m pretty sure I would get tired of it way before the Vivid Girl would. Several days and a bottle of Xanax before, most likely.

One thing about going to Grandma’s house is that sometimes there are cousins there. This time there weren’t any, but Grandma took time off work to play with us and we had a good time anyway. Grandpa doesn’t go to work, but he doesn’t really play either, so we left him home to think of ways to cook the vegetables from the garden.

I’m running out of time because I have to go pick up the Vivid Girl and her schoolmate from Gardening Camp, which is very fun but not as fun as school, which also has a garden, though school doesn’t have a pink poodle and gardening camp does. The way to get through summer is to focus on such advantages. With Grandma, we went to an amusement park where the Vivid Girl rode her first roller coaster. It was a tiny little thing called The Little Dipper, I guess because of its size and its hilliness, but after riding it I think it should have been called the WhipperSnapper, because of its size and its ability to undo months of chiropractic work in such a short ride. Whip! Snap! Ouch! Ride over.

We also rode the bumper cars, which was super excellent fun because the park was so uncrowded that we were the only two cars running, and we could really zoom around the track and also smack into each other hilariously.

And now I must zoom around the track to get to camp pick up on time. The eggplant has been rinsed and dried and breaded and is in the fridge waiting to be fried. I don’t know how bitter it will be, or whether the rest of the day will be sweet, or whether I will end up fried as well. Ah, the joys of summer!

Halftime

You know how they say no two children ever grow up in exactly the same family? I think it also is true that no two teenagers ever go to exactly the same high school. And that goes a long way toward explaining how it is that my sister is currently traveling from Seattle, Washington to Small Town, Texas to attend her twenty year high school reunion while I am lounging around Austin in my pajamas, safe in the knowledge that my high school reunion committee doesn’t have my contact information, and would find a way to “misplace” it if they did. (Just like they did with all my Homecoming Queen votes back in the fall of 1987. Oh, yeah, little Miss Class President, I knew about that!)

Now, my sister is feeling a bit nervous about going to this reunion, as any normal person would, and she is wondering what she was thinking when she agreed to go.  She has been living in a beautiful blue island of liberalism and secular tolerance for quite a few years now, and it is safe to say that many of her former classmates are still swimming in the red red waters of their Bible belted hometown. But the reunion committee is headed by two of her best friends, by which I mean not just her best friends from high school but still her best friends now, because my sister is a loyal and friendly person who gets along with others and knows how to have a good time. I’ve made her promise to report anything crazy or scary that happens, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to have fun.

Now, I suppose it’s technically possible that I would find a way to have fun if I were to attend one of my high school reunions too (assuming I could find out when and where it was happening, that is). After all, I’m a woman who tried to make chemotherapy fun. And while I would definitely choose going back to high school over going through cancer treatment again (wait, is that right? hmmm, tough one. hopefully hypothetical), High School Reunion falls somewhere under Root Canal on my list of things I would like to do over my summer vacation. This is, of course, at least partly because my sister and I did not go to the same high school. Even though we did. oh, you know what I mean.

I started high school in the suburban Midwestern town where I grew up. It was a big school, academically competitive, crowded. I knew a bunch of the kids in my classes from junior high, but most of the kids I had gone to elementary school with had dispersed into different groups, and I only saw them in the band room or the cafeteria. Which was fine, cause I hadn’t really gotten through that whole 6th Grade Girls Are Mean thing very gracefully and I was grateful for a chance to reinvent myself and make a new start. And I was working on that, and it was hard (as it often seems to be) and then my family moved to Texas. And I thought, as have many before me, well, why not? If I’m going to recreate myself it might as well be in Texas.

Even though we had lived quite happily for many years on a dead-end street within easy walking distance of the library, the town hall, the elementary school, and the Tastee-Freeze, my parents decided to use the move to Texas to pursue some of their dreams as well, and this included Living Out in the Country and Having Land. At this time, in Texas, those things were very possible but did not usually come attached to what most people would call Good Schools. The first place my parents wanted to buy was basically a ranch on a lake and it sounded perfect until they decided to call the local school and make sure we girls would be able to go to school there and still get into college. The conversation went something like this:

My mother: So, my daughter is a freshman but she is taking Honors Geometry. Would she be able to do this at your school?

School representative: We have geometry.

My mother: Oh, okay. Good. Well, my daughter is taking French I and hopes to be able to take four years of French. Does your school offer that? (I know, French! What was I thinking? ah, les folies de la jeunesse!)

School representative: We-ell. Now, we did have a Spanish teacher, at one time. But she died.

So my parents let go of their lakefront dream and bought House2, which was still a respectable distance from town and still on a sizable piece of land. And which was on the bus route for the schools in the biggest town in the county, which also happened to be the only town that had a high school big enough to have both a Varsity and a Junior Varsity football team. Which, and let’s be honest, was basically the whole reason they had a high school at all.

But they did have a French teacher and a Spanish teacher (though we later discovered that these were actually the same person, a native Spanish speaker who really, really liked French food) and they later added a teacher of German, which is what my sister took when she got to high school. And that turned out to be a good choice, because when the Spanish/French teacher died the school got a new Spanish teacher but not a French teacher and there I was with only two years of language on my transcript and no desire, as a junior, to start over in Spanish with a bunch of freshmen.

Who were not at all like the freshmen I had gone to school with in the Midwest. No way. Those kids, maybe because it was a much more urban setting, knew how to fly under the radar. They played it cool and kept things quiet. They caused trouble, for sure: we had gangs, and teen pregnancies, and a “game” played in the hallways called Open Chest that actually sent several kids to the emergency room. These Texas kids, though, were a whole other deal. They were rowdy. They would get up and wander around during class, try on each others’ hats, throw things out the windows to their friends in the quad. In geometry we had an ancient teacher who every Friday would write out a quiz on an a transparency and leave it up on the overhead projector for the first part of class. Every other Friday this kid named Trey (half the boys were named Trey) would walk into class, pick up the spray bottle kept on the stand under the projector, and spray water right onto the quiz. The teacher would rise up out of her chair, flapping her arms in fury, and Trey would escape her grasp and run out into the hall laughing.

He was in my Trig class the next year, though, so I’m pretty sure he passed Geometry. Everyone passed Trig cause it was taught by one of the football coaches, though not the same one who taught World History. Football players passed everything.

If I could have attended high school in Texas as an anthropologist of some sort and not as an aching, lonely, bored, irritated teenage girl, things probably would have gone a bit better for me (though I’m still not too sure I’d be invited to the reunions!). However, I was wandering the halls looking for connection and meaning and damn if those things weren’t hard to find. When I was a junior the high school moved into a brand new building (we had been going to the same school that most of my classmates’ parents had gone to, and I think it was haunted by small town kids from an earlier, less college-bound, time), and my sister started school as a freshman. By then I had more or less branded myself as a Loner and an Outcast, though I still had some friends in less windy corners. Being an honors student helped. So did being in band.

My sister was in band, too, and she and I looked so completely different from each other and had such a common last name that no one ever suspected we were related. This was how it happened that when some older girls took her under their wing and told her what she needed to know about high school, they actually pointed me out and said, “See that girl over there? Stay away from her. She’s weird.” And my sister, bless her heart, said, “Oh, yeah, her. SHE’S MY SISTER!”

After which nobody really fucked with her, either. Though when the time came for the big “voted most likely” weird ceremony my senior year, my sister was nominated “Most Popular Girl” in her class. Another reason why I suspect she is going to have a pretty good time at her reunion this weekend. (I was nominated “Most Scholarly” but I didn’t win. Maybe if they had called the category “Most Eager to Get the Hell out of Here so she Can go to College and Have Some Fun” I would have had a better chance.)

It used to drive me crazy when grown-ups would go out of their way to tell me that my high school years were supposed to be the best years of my life. Literally, crazy. More sensitive but still grown up people would acknowledge that I would probably do better at college, especially outside the Bible belt. That did turn out to be the case, and I have been to several college reunions already (SO MUCH FUN) and you better believe I keep my contact info updated with the college alumni office, even though they mostly use it to ask me for money and not to invite me to parties. But I’m a grown-up myself now, and I can have my own parties pretty much any time I want to, which is why, as I always suspected they would be, these years right now are the best of my life so far, and I have every reason to expect that they are going to keep on getting better and better.

However, if they ever want to offer up a recount of those Homecoming Queen votes, I would still like my chance to ride around the football field in a golf cart wearing a tiara. And I probably wouldn’t even insist on wearing the outfit I had picked out for the event: my mom’s prom dress, torn longjohns, and green hightops. Though it might be fun to get a tattoo of a girl dressed like that to commemorate the event as one of the best days of my life.

Thanks for use of the photo, originally uploaded to Flickr by Mad African!: (Broken Sword and protected under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Outdoor Academy of Sweden – Ice Hotel

I used to be the kind of person (if this is a kind of person) who didn’t really think much about Sweden.

That, however, was a long time ago.

I started to think seriously about Sweden the same day I tried sushi for the first time, when I was in college. The way it came about was this: I danced (and flirted) with a very charming young man at a waltz party. Then I asked this young man out on a date, after which he revealed that he was gay, but also that he wanted to go out with me anyway, but not on a date. Up to this point, there is nothing Swedish (or, actually, unusual, at least for me) about this story.  Because I had a car, I picked the guy up at his apartment (he lived alone, off-campus, which was one of the things that would have made him such an awesome boyfriend) and he gave me a little gift that he had made for me. It was like a card, sort of, in that it was made of cardstock and there was an outside part that had my name written on it in fancy letters filled in with colored pencil. The inside part, when slipped out, turned out to be Sweden. By which I mean, he had drawn a picture of Sweden on a piece of cardstock, and colored it in, and cut it out, and written the word “Sweden” on it. It was actually quite lovely, though really very puzzling. When I expressed surprise at being given the country of Sweden, he seemed puzzled that I would  be surprised and explained simply that I seemed like a Sweden sort of person to him. Then we went to dinner, and he tricked me into eating raw fish, which I was sure I would not like at all but which of course turned out to be one of the loveliest and most wonderful things you can eat.

Time passed and we were friends for a while and then he graduated and I took a year off, and I lost touch with him and with many other Scorpio boys both gay and straight. But I never stopped eating sushi. And because he was so right about me and sushi, I had to wonder whether he also knew something about me and Sweden.

But I was busy trying to be an adult and start a career and find love and all that stuff, so I didn’t think about Sweden too much or too often.

Until my parents moved to Ireland. They were going to be there for two years, and they were going to pay for a trip for me to come visit them and do some traveling and exploring around those parts. See, I had never been overseas but my sister had been to England on a college trip. And in our family, fairness is important and it means that no kid gets something that the other kid doesn’t, and so they owed me. I didn’t go visit them the first year they were there, because I was so busy with the career-starting and the love-finding and also the giant-puppy-training, which was not even part of the original plan. And then my dad’s company closed their Dublin office and my parents got sent home a year early and they still owed me a trip but they weren’t in Ireland for me to visit anymore.

So then I realized that I could go anywhere I wanted. And, for reasons that I can’t remember now, because this was a long time ago, I decided that I wanted to go to London. And also I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel.

The Ice Hotel is a hotel made entirely out of ice. It’s in Sweden, and it’s only in the winter. In the spring it melts and then in the winter they build it again. To get there, you take the train to Kiruna, which is north of the Arctic Circle, and then you travel by dog sled 15 km or so to the hotel.  When you get there, you get to drink hot lemonade or other drinks that you order at a bar made entirely out of ice, and you get to sit on chairs made of ice and sleep wrapped in furs on a bed made of ice.

If reading the last paragraph did not make you want to go to the Ice Hotel yourself, I don’t know what to say. I spent a lot of time reading about the Ice Hotel and thinking about the Ice Hotel and talking about the Ice Hotel. Ice Hotel Ice Hotel Ice Hotel.

Strangely, I couldn’t really find anybody who wanted to go to the Ice Hotel with me. So I decided to go on my own.

I was planning this trip in the summer, in Austin, and it is hot here in the summer, and that may be part of the reason why the Ice Hotel appealed to me so much. Also, I was born on the summer solstice, but I have always been a night owl, and so the idea of spending long hours of darkness in northern Sweden on the winter solstice had a definite appeal for me. Also, it was 1999 and the last full moon of the millennium was going to be on December 21, my half-birthday and the winter solstice. How could I resist? I booked my reservation at the Ice Hotel seven months in advance. For the rest of the trip, I decided to fly to London, spend a week hanging about there, then fly to Stockholm, spend a night, and take the train up to Kiruna the next day. It is a 12-hour train ride from Stockholm to Kiruna; the train leaves in the evening and arrives in Kiruna in the morning, although morning is a funny thing to think about in a place where the sun won’t even come up.

It was a perfect plan, and when the time came I embarked on my trip with a little bit of fear and a whole lot of enthusiasm. I had a great time in London, staying in the Holland Park youth hostel, singing Christmas carols at St. Martin in the Fields and then enjoying mulled wine and mince pies in the cafe located in the crypt. I bought a pair of Doc Martens in the shop at Covent Garden and then gave myself terrible blisters wearing my new boots and walking all over the city. Up and down the steps of the underground stations, in and out of parks and shops and museums and churches. I had no schedule and no commitments and so I just did what I wanted all day every day. It was lovely. I went to the movies and to the observatory at Greenwich, I searched out the street with all the Indian restaurants and spent long cozy hours reading in pubs. Looking back now, after six and half years of motherhood, I can’t even imagine having that much freedom and independence.

And then I flew to Stockholm. I had prepared myself for this part of the trip by taking a Swedish class at UT Informal Classes. The class was taught by a very cute and idiosyncratic young American woman who had been an exchange student in Sweden in high school and was currently the only PhD student in the Swedish program at UT. She told us that Swedes have a very high opinion of their own country and that they will often say that “Sweden is just like America, only better.” She explained that Swedes are more physical and less verbal than Americans; so, for example, if a Swedish person finds that your cart is in their way at the grocery store, they will not say, “Ahem, ahem, excuse me,” like we might. They will not even step over, move your cart out of the way, and then push their own cart through. Oh, no. They will take their cart and they will RAM your cart with it. They mean no offense. They are simply being Swedish.

Also, in Sweden, it is very important to be self-sufficient. Therefore, it is considered quite rude and insulting to offer help to people. For example, if you see a young mother with three small children, a dog, a stroller, and four grocery bags struggling to get on the bus, you might think it would be polite and friendly to offer her a hand. In Texas, you would be right. In Sweden, you would be oh so very wrong. Way out of line. Astonishingly rude.

Also, in Sweden they have vowels that we don’t have. I learned how to pronounce most of them, and I learned how to say please, and thank you, and a few other things like that. And I learned that in Sweden high school is conducted in English so in most cases I would not be called upon to use any Swedish at all, which was good, because Swedish is hard and that class was short.

When I got to Sweden I learned a few other things. For example, if you are allergic to the species of juniper that we here in Texas call cedar, you probably should not go to Sweden in the winter time. Cedar Fever hit me as soon as I got off the plane, though it was so bad and so unexpected that it took me a few days to figure out what it was. Also, it is not so easy to get a train ticket from Stockholm to Kiruna the week before Christmas. I never expected that there would be so many people traveling north of the Arctic Circle at that time of year! But when I went to the train station, all the trains were full. The girl at the ticket counter explained that she could sell me a ticket, but I would have to stand (all night!) and there would be nowhere to put my backpack, so I would have to hold it in my arms (all night!). I stood there, shocked, blinking my red allergic eyes and wiping my runny nose, and I stared at her for so long that she finally said, in her crisp clear English, “I don’t know what you want to do.” I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel, is what I wanted to do, so I left the train station and went back to my youth hostel, which was in an old prison and where I slept in one of the cells, and I called the airline to see if I could fly to Kiruna instead. And they said they would sell me a ticket, but it would cost more than my whole trip, which I simply could not afford.

And so I did not go to the Ice Hotel.

And I spent a couple of days crying in my prison cell and trying to figure out what to do and when the desk clerk told me that I had to leave the hostel because they were closing for the season I gave up. I came home early, and instead of celebrating the solstice at the Ice Hotel and spending a gloriously independent Christmas all by myself in Stockholm I spent the next few days curled up on my parents’ couch and playing with my giant puppy, who was very glad to see me, in a way that no Swedish person had been.

And I have never been back to Sweden. Though I have been to IKEA many times, and with much better results.

And now I have a Swedish car, who is a big white Volvo station wagon, and who is named Vendela, which means “wanderer” or “Vandal” or something like that. It’s a Swedish name. And my family is very very safe inside this wonderful car, and we drive her to the chiropractor and all around town, and when the Vivid Girl and I go wandering through parking lots looking for our lovely car we call out, “oh Ven-DEH-la!” until we find her, and this makes us happy.

And once again it is summer in Austin, which is hot, and which means that the Vivid Girl is not in school and instead has wanted to spend all her time with me and I was going crazy because she was even following me into the bathroom and she would follow me when I took two steps into the laundry room to toss a towel into the basket and she would get in between me and the fridge when I opened the freezer to get out some ice and then finally I found something that would keep her busy for a few minutes at a time so I could catch my breath and gather my thoughts: the Swedish Chef, on youtube.

And tonight I finally got a chance to write because when I came home from my new book group the Vivid Girl was already asleep, even though we are so very close to the longest day of the year. And the book that got me out of the house tonight? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which is, of course, Swedish.

Sweden. There’s something about it. I’m just not sure what it is.

Tack så mycket for use of the photo from flickr, originally uploaded by VisitSweden and protected under a creative commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

Maybe Mercury’s shadow is still casting a bit of gloom over the situation, or maybe buying a car is just hard, but the last two days I have been busting my butt trying to find, finance, inspect, and purchase an appropriate replacement for the Big Red Car, and what do I have to show for it? Nada, that’s what.

It all started last week when I found the perfect car at the perfect dealership. Well, actually it was a minivan and even if it wasn’t perfect it was at least my favorite color. And I found it on the Internet, and the dealer conveniently provided a way for me to apply for financing on line, and then they sent me an email that said, Come on in, and if you bring a suitable down payment we’ll sell you the car.

Hooray!

But it took us about 24 hours to scramble around and determine that we have about half a suitable down payment in our hot little hands and it will take us a few days to come up with the rest. We are struggling for liquidity, you see. So the next day we went in to the dealer to give them the money we did have and see if they would hold the car for us but right before we got there somebody else bought it.

So, we were sad, but we knew they didn’t have any other cars that we wanted that day because the Internet had told us that they did have some cars that we might want except that they were all white and the only thing we want less than a white car is a black car. Which they also had. So we left but said that we would keep an eye on their inventory and be back in a flash if they got something good. And we said to each other, Well, it’s too bad we didn’t get that seemingly perfect car but at least this gives us a little time to liquify the necessary assets so we will have the suitable down payment all ready to go when the next great car comes up.

Which it did, just yesterday as a matter of fact, though unfortunately not at the perfect dealership, rather at some other dealership located much farther away from perfection. In the suburbs, if you will. But this car was silver, and not white or black, and it had LEATHER seats and other lovely extras, and reasonably low miles, and a very lovely low price.

And so I applied for financing at that dealership and first they told me that if I had a trade-in they could finance my purchase of this car, actually a minivan, that I so desired. But I said, I don’t have a trade-in cause of how one of our cars is all smashed up and the other of our cars is our only car. But I do have a suitable down payment, actually worth more than our only remaining car would fetch as a trade-in anyway. Cause it’s our “second car,” you know? Not the really good one (which got smashed) but the other one. The one that needs work and that leaks certain fluids and that has the back seat window held up with duct tape. The one that we certainly would have loved to trade in if only we still had the Big Red Car to bop around in.

But no, said the car salesman, they won’t finance this car with a down payment of actual money. Only with a trade in. Is that, I asked, because of the credit rating? (Because there is a bit of trouble just right now with the credit rating and let me just share this tip that I have learned from my own experience: you may think that getting a really rare and aggressive form of cancer and then having your reliable mid-size economy car smashed by a recklessly driven SUV is a good way to build financial security, but you’d be wrong. Turns out it works against you.) But no, he said, it’s not the credit rating. It’s the mileage. The bank wants to finance a car that has less than 80,000 miles on it, but this very well kept and reasonably priced minivan has 80,500 miles on it so the bank says no.

Oh, I see, I say, though at this point I do not see at all and also time has elapsed during which I have gone home, eaten dinner, slept, spent time with the lymph machine, eaten breakfast, and come back to the dealership to continue the same baffling conversation. But! he says. We have some other cars! That the bank says you can buy. They will finance a car with lower mileage for up to almost twice the cost. Say, maybe this car, or that one. And he points to a giant Lexus SUV and also some other car that is so completely everything I don’t want that it is literally invisible to me. But then somehow I get the idea that if they will finance almost twice the cost maybe they will finance TWO cars, and then we could trade in the one car or something (not that we actually have the title in our possession, you see, but it is on its way to us and we can always pray that it will arrive today).

And for some reason, maybe because I have mesmerized him with my car-buying insanity, the car guy says Yes! I think we could do that! And so I test drive two cars, which happen to be the Lexus SUV and this little Kia Rio. Which I think is just a hilarious combination and for that reason alone I want to buy both of them and see if they interact in any way that would reveal basic and startling truths about social class in America. Or something.

Well. They are both great, and fun to drive in totally different ways. The Kia because it is tiny and thrifty and eager to please and it has a cute personality and it stops on a dime. The Lexus because, even though it has a weird perfumey smell all in it, is all leather and fake wood and automatic everything with a sun roof, and when you accelerate it smoothly and gracefully picks up speed at an almost alarming rate, and there is a place to put your purse and even a special little footrest for your non-accelerating foot so it doesn’t get tired just sitting there or so you don’t smudge your newly-painted toenails or something.

So I get back to the dealership and then things start getting really weird. The guy who I’d been talking to is supposedly “with a customer” but in fact everytime I see him he is walking from the showroom to the office. I never ever see him walk the other way. He stops on the way to give me some news about my case, but I only understand about half of what he says because he uses pronouns exclusively without antecedents and also he seems to use car dealer lingo, which I can only translate about a third of the time. Also there is a woman who is somehow helping us, though her name is something other than “Rebecca” even though the guy keeps telling us that Rebecca is working on the numbers and Rebecca will be right out. This other woman also does  not believe in antecedents and she is maybe a little bit rude, though not in a way I feel I should take personally because it looks like she talks to everyone like that. And she really is “with a customer” but keeps getting up to go “talk to the boss” the way they do at car dealerships and some of the time when she is going to talk to the boss she actually comes over to tell me things like, “Looks like you’re gonna get your deal but my finance manager says he has to put everything in his name,” and then she stalks off while I try to figure out what exactly my deal is and whether the finance manager is talking about himself or about Mr. B, which is what I figure it must be, but the way things have been going, who knows?

But I have a vague sense that things are going okay, and anyway Mr. B and I have talked and agreed that we want to buy both cars but if we can only buy one we want the Kia cause it has way fewer miles on it, would make a good replacement for our second car (though we’d still be searching for our “first car”) and anyway costs a LOT less than the ridiculous luxury SUV.

But the dealer guy has been working the deal to secure financing for the Lexus. Cause that’s what he wants to sell us, for one thing. And cause even though it actually has MORE miles on it than the minivan that we couldn’t finance because it had too many miles, it also costs lots more so apparently the bank thinks that’s fine. And we say, well if we can only get one of them we want the Kia. And he says well, you probably only can get one of them because of how you still have this “open auto.” And we finally figure out that he means because there is still a balance on the loan for the Big Red Car because of how the insurance company offered us the “retail value” but not the “replacement value” and we had never heard of this thing called “gap insurance,” which is apparently what you need if you are in a situation like ours where somebody totally trashes your car so that it can never be driven again and the only thing you did wrong was leave your house that day and neglect to buy a kind of insurance you had never heard of.

So, because the paperwork for the Big Red Car is still haunting us, we can only buy one car. And it can’t be the Kia cause the bank “likes” a Lexus better than a Kia. For obvious reasons, I’m sure, but we don’t even like SUVs (actually, I may have mentioned that I am planning to destroy get them all off the roads by the end of the year someday) and we do like buying things that we can afford rather than buying things that are much too expensive and that we can’t afford to repair just so that the bank can feel secure about their investment or whatever.

So we flee. Actually, by this time I had totally taken leave of my senses and I was in love with the Lexus SUV and I couldn’t believe that I’d never realized how much I love the fake wood and the leather and the perfumey smell and probably the only reason I think luxury cars are a little ridiculous is that I’ve never been fortunate enough to own one but now here is my chance and I can’t let it pass me by!!!!! But Mr. B takes me gently in hand, and he says, in the kind of voice you use to talk someone in off the ledge, “Honey. I don’t want to say anything negative, and I am just as eager as you are to get this whole thing settled and behind us, but I honestly believe that a Lexus SUV with 85,000 miles on it, and that will cause us to go over our budget on our monthly car payment, is not the right car for our family.” He reaches out for my hand, and I extend my hand as if in slow motion, and nod my head without blinking my eyes, and allow myself to be led away from the giant luxury vehicle.

And now we are back at square one and even the white and/or black minivans at the perfect dealer are starting to look mighty perfect to me. Providing, of course, that they will accept a down payment and not require a trade in, and providing also that the cars are sufficiently expensive without having too many miles on them, and providing, of course, that sweet darling Mercury continues to get her giant meddling butt out of our way.

Well, just when I was getting on a kick of updating every couple of weeks instead of once a quarter, I fell back into my old rhythms. And I’ll tell you why. Cause it’s been a hell of a month around here, that’s why.

I told you about the car crash, of course. Well, that has provided me with various and annoying inconveniences, such as Not Having a Car and Going to the Chiropractor Every Damn Day. I mean, I’m glad I wasn’t seriously hurt, and I’m seriously glad that neither the Vivid Girl nor the wedding cake were in the back of the car, but I’m still really irritated that there are people out there driving cars three times the size of mine without feeling the need to exercise at least three times the caution that I do. More would be better, cause honestly I’m not even that careful what with all the makeup application, phone calls, and passing snacks and drinks to the back seat though at least I do manage not to run right into people.

So anyway it was obvious that once I rested up a bit and stopped popping pain pills I had a bunch of stuff to do. Like deal with the insurance paperwork and go to the chiropractor and get a new car. But first I had to go to Houston to meet my new doctor and have a checkup and a treatment so I did that first. And, despite my determination to have the most. fun. cancer. ever. it wasn’t really that fun of a trip. For various reasons. My new doctor is good, though, and I finally found the secret of getting the right person to start my IV the first time so that I don’t have to listen to the chemo nurses moan about what bad veins I have while they stab with needles for 45 minutes in order to get me ready for a 15 minute treatment. But some of my paperwork didn’t get to the right place in time, and the chemo suite was running two hours late, and there were just generally some irritating aspects of the whole venture that made me feel that I would much rather be at home playing Bejeweled in my pajamas.

Which is exactly where I was for the following week, because even though my treatment wasn’t technically “chemo,” in that it’s a drug that is being used to prevent cancer rather than treat it, it still makes me sick. And even though the effects of chemo were somewhat predictable, the effects of this drug on me have been all over the place. Sometimes I get really sick with a fever and everything. Sometimes I get a weird rushing sound in my ears and my legs hurt for a couple of days. Twice in a row I had no apparent reaction whatsoever. This time I got depressed. And even though I have a personal rule against looking up health information on the Internet when I am depressed, I looked it up: depression is a known side effect of this treatment that occurs in 14% of patients studied. Why a bone medicine causes depression I do not know. Everything else about depression I know all too well. The kicker is that, even though my old rock star cancer doctor (from Italy, swoon!) thought that I need to take this medicine every three months, my new (stodgy, old, American) cancer doctor says that he will give it to me if I want it, but only every six months, and he doesn’t think I need it.

And both of these recommendations are based on the same study. Which apparently is the only one available. What’s a cancer patient to do?

Well, in this case, I guess I just need to plan ahead for the next treatment and make sure I’m in a cozy quiet low-stress place (Lake Tahoe, anyone?) with my iPhone charged and plenty of chocolate laid in. But that’s not what I did this time. This time I came home to where my husband and the Vivid Girl live, and I got up in the mornings, and I drove them around in Mr. B’s car. Cause of how I don’t have a car anymore. But the problem on at least two of the days was I got started driving them around but then I would start crying and falling apart, and Mr. B would have to leave work to take me home and then he would have to do all the driving around. On the third day I just stayed home and played Bejeweled and watched 30 Rock and got friends to come pick me up and drive me to the chiropractor. Much better.

So that week passed and then it was the next week and I still didn’t have a car. Because of how I still had to deal with the insurance paperwork and by that time it was also obvious that I should have gone to see a personal injury lawyer and also I was so irritated that I had decided to declare war on SUVs and if I can’t get rid of them through legal channels I guess I’ll have to turn to more unconventional methods and then also I was still spending all my time at the chiropractor.

But, and here I come to the point of the post, I realized that all my problems were not because of the car crash at all. They were because Mercury is in retrograde. Or, it was, at the time. And even though I don’t place a whole lot of stock in all that astrology stuff I do place a bit of stock in it and here’s why. For two years when I was in college every single guy I was ever attracted to was a Scorpio. I could walk into a party with 50 people, only one of whom was born in October or November and that’s the one I would end up talking to. Every single time. Now, a lot of people I love are Scorpios (my mom is a Scorpio! and the Vivid Girl!) but any astrology book will tell you that it is not a good love sign for me, a wet and weepy Cancer girl. And I still don’t know what to make of the fact that for two years I was really attracted to what could only be dangerous, but I was pretty damn convinced by the numbers. It just wasn’t statistically possible for all the guys I met during two of the most social and flirtatious years of my life to have the same horoscope unless astrology is true.

So even though I like to think of myself as a Scientist, I had to admit that I was overwhelmed by the evidence. Just as, since then, I have been completely overwhelmed by the evidence that when Mercury goes into retrograde life goes into chaos. Total communication breakdown. Complete inability to do paperwork. I can’t schedule a meeting, get a good cell phone connection, or have a civil conversation about money with my husband. (This may have something to do with the fact that my husband, as a Gemini, is ruled by Mercury. Or, who knows? it may not.)

So here it is, more than a month after my car crash, and I still don’t have a car. Or an insurance settlement. Or a blog post. Because of Mercury. Because it has been an inauspicious time, all around. But as we move out of the shadow of Mercury in retrograde I can feel the auspiciousness rising. My sources tell me that things should be all cleared by May 28. And a good thing, too, cause that’s when the Vivid Girl gets out of school. For the whole summer.

Apparently the universe read my blog post last week and suspected that I wasn’t going to slow down anytime soon. Because this week started with a series of bangs that have definitely stopped my wheels from spinning.

First of all, we discovered over the weekend that our pockets were full of lint and empty of cash. Everything came due at once and here we are with only a few dollars to last until payday. Time to eat the food that I have squirrelled away in the pantry, the beautiful pantry with the double doors and the luxurious spice rack that seduced me into buying this house in the first place. Time to cook up some oatmeal and soak some beans. Time to eat canned vegetables and bake our own bread.

So Sunday evening I put some oatmeal in a pot with water and Monday morning I got up and cooked it so we would all have a cheap and nourishing breakfast. But the Vivid Girl woke up on the wrong side of the middle of our bed and she most emphatically did not want oatmeal. And she stomped over to the pantry and flung open the door……….. and it broke, and came off in her hand, and bottles and jars and little packets of seasoning hailed down on her.

Mr. B looked at it and said it was amazing the door had lasted this long, considering how it was made and how many heavy things I had been storing on its shelves. And we calmed down the Vivid Girl as best we could, and forgave her, and stepped back to survey the damage, which wasn’t too bad because even though there were a lot of glass bottles and jars on the floor, only one of them had actually broken.

It was the molasses. It’s always either the molasses or the fish sauce. I don’t know why.

So, we got the worst part of that mess cleaned up and we gave the Vivid Girl something to eat and Mr. B took her off to school. And I said to myself, “Now I can really get caught up around here!” and I started rushing around putting loads of laundry into the washer and cooking the beans that had soaked overnight and getting myself ready to go to my weekly therapy appointment with my therapist, Dr. Suess (yes, that is her real name!). And as I was putting down my hairbrush and leaving the bathroom I looked down at my left hand and noticed that my wedding ring wasn’t on it.

That was a little strange but not too much because I have been wearing my wedding ring on my pinky finger because my ring finger is sometimes, but not always, too big for me to get my ring on and off comfortably and when I can’t get it off I feel kind of panicky because when I was a kid my dad told me about a guy whose wedding ring got caught on some kind of machinery and it tore his whole finger off and that’s why my dad never wears a ring and that’s why I like to be able to slip mine off without feeling like my finger is coming off with it. So I wear it on my pinky but then sometimes my hands are cold and the ring is a bit loose. So I looked around a little bit but I couldn’t find it and that’s when I started to worry that I had dropped it down a drain and lost it forever.

So I was feeling a little bit bad about that as I drove down to Dr. Suess’ office. And maybe because I was feeling bad about the ring I did something that you are not supposed to do, which is I decided to give my husband a quick call so we would have a little time to connect and I wouldn’t feel like losing my ring was some big portentous event.

And I was talking on the phone and driving, which you are not supposed to do, and I came to a stop because the car in front of me was stopped, because the car in front of her was stopped and waiting for an opportunity to turn left.

And I was chatting to my husband about this and that and feeling pretty light-hearted and happy and then suddenly I wasn’t.

Suddenly I was sucked into a vortex of motion and soundless crashing. Suddenly I was rushing forward in space and backward in time. I could not understand what was happening to me, but I felt my feet going one way and my head and arm going another. I felt myself being pulled under by some fierce and unexpected undertow. There was nothing to hold onto, and I couldn’t see or hear anything that made sense.

And then that stopped, and I found that I was lying down in my car, and someone was standing next to me saying “Are you all right?” And I took a deep breath and did a quick body scan and said “NO I AM NOT ALL RIGHT!” and he took a few steps back and sort of walked around a minute and came back and asked me again. And I said again, “No, I am not okay. This is not okay.” And I realized that I couldn’t see anything because my glasses had flown off my face and so I asked him to find my glasses, which he did. And I was up and walking around, and talking to people, and I realized that what had happened was this: I was sitting there waiting for the person in front of the person in front of me to turn left so we could all go again, but this guy drove up behind me in his huge and speedy SUV and he just didn’t stop. He ran right into me. And I ran into the car in front of me, and here’s who was in that car: a pregnant woman and two small children.

But they were okay. And I was okay. And the guy in the SUV? well, you know he was okay.

And my husband, who was on the phone this whole time and heard everything, he was surprisingly okay. He knew I was okay because he had heard me talking to the guy, and he was in his car waiting to find out where I needed him to go. As soon as he heard the crash he got his keys and left his office and waited to find out.

But my car, the lovely Big Red Car, is not okay at all. The back is all smashed in, and the glass is all smashed out. After the excitement of talking to the firemen and the paramedics and the police and the nice people who stopped who helped us, I settled down enough to realize that there was glass in my pants, and in my shoe. The driver’s seat of my car is twisted and mangled and bent out of shape, and I have corresponding aches and pains in my whole body. A sore neck, a bruised knee, an aching back.

So I came home and put on my pajamas and padded across the sticky kitchen floor to get a blanket out of the dryer, and my wedding ring fell out. So I put it on and laid myself gingerly down in bed and now I am taking it very very easy.

Last week was a crazy busy week here at Casa de Diggs. I made a wedding cake (and yes, I am planning to write a post about that), and also we have some dear friends visiting us (they live in Panama!) with their 21-month old daughter, and then of course there was going out of town to the actual wedding, which both Mr. B and I were in, and in the midst of all that I also started a weekly farm subscription so we got a big box of veggies and stuff. Whew! It was a lot, and I haven’t even mentioned what a big job it was helping the Vivid Girl identify and manage all the feelings she was having about all these major events. Suffice to say that it was a very big job, and since we were using all our regular time to do all the other stuff, we mostly worked on that job during the hours previously dedicated to sleep.

So, by Sunday evening, with all these fun and sometimes not-so-fun things behind us, we were all very very tired. And so we said, “Let’s take it easy this week.”

This was my plan all along. Over the past two or three years, since I’ve been dealing with cancer, I’ve had to slow down a lot. I used to be kind of a go-go rah-rah-rah just-say-yes sort of person, but since I got sick and went through treatment I’ve had to pay for every busy day by spending the following day in the ugly mauve La-Z-Boy. And this whole wedding extravaganza was way more than just one busy day; it was more like six busy days, and I can’t remember the last time I managed something like that. And Mr. B? well, he can do it but he really truly prefers not to. He likes downtime, and a lot of it. The Vivid Girl is like me, but also like him. She’s a study in inertia: once set in motion, she has a lot of momentum and will go for ever (in the absence of friction), but you’ve got to apply quite a bit of force to change her state. And the more friction there is, or the more often force is applied, the more things devolve into entropy and chaos.

So, being a wise woman who knows how to take care of herself, her husband, and her child, I left the calendar blank for this whole week. No meetings, no appointments, no playdates. No special events of any kind. Just resting and getting back on track.

You probably already know stories that begin just like that. And so you know what happens next.

What happens next is the houseguests from Panama realize that your house is much nicer than a hotel, especially for their toddler, and ask if they can stay a few more days. And because we love them and rarely get to see them and because it is more fun having them than not having them, we say YES! STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE! and we mean it.

Even though that decision has the unforeseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to school. This is unforeseen because the Vivid Girl, who often tried to find ways of getting out of going to preschool, almost never tries to get out of going to her new school. In fact, she often wishes she could go to school on Saturday and Sunday. And she resents all those times when there is no school, like Spring Break, because school is so much more fun than Spring Break, even if your mama lets you eat nothing but trailer food and takes you to the zoo to see baby lions and helps you collect and carry a whole pail of rocks from the Llano River. School, it turns out, is better than all that. But the Toddler from Panama? she is even better than school!

So this week I have been taking the Vivid Girl to school late (two or three hours late sometimes, but that’s okay, because her school is cool like that), or picking her up early (today, four hours early). It’s really cutting into my taking it easy time. Because no matter what I am doing when I am spending time with the Vivid Girl, I am not taking it easy. Unless I’m asleep. And usually not even then, I think, because lately I have been waking up sore from fighting for my space in the bed. (The Vivid Girl is sleeping in our room with us, and the Toddler from Panama is sleeping in the Vivid Girl’s room. Not that the Vivid Girl would be sleeping there anyway. Even if we paid her.)

There is also the totally-foreseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to bed. This was easy to predict because she has never ever once in her whole life wanted to go to bed. But over the past six years we have actually developed a bedtime routine that usually results in her being asleep sometime before nine’o'clock if we’re lucky. The excitement of having a Toddler from Panama to bathe with and read to has been a very sweet disruption to our bedtime routine. The wrathful disappointment of having a Toddler from Panama who is still out with her parents when bedtime arrives has been a little less sweet but just as disruptive.

But still we are enjoying having our friends with us, and it is very touching and sweet to see our two girls having such a good time together, and the sweetness of seeing our child reading to a younger child who is wearing her old pajamas and tucked in to her very own bed is more than compensation for any minor disruptions in our daily routine.

So naturally when my friend called and said that she had to leave town for a family emergency and asked if we could take her dog for a week or so, I said YES! OF COURSE! FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIKE!

And I meant it.

And for being able to say that, and mean it, after the busy days I’ve been having…. for that, I am truly grateful.

Lately I have been telling everyone on Facebook what I put in my green smoothies everyday. And the funny thing is that I have been getting a lot of comments and questions, and it seems like instead of being freaked out by the whole concept of green smoothies, a bunch of people are actually thinking something like, “Hey, that sounds like something I should get into.”

And so I thought it would be a good topic for a blog post, especially since it does seem to be about time for my quarterly update. (jeesh, where does the time go? well, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post for sure. Look for it in June or so.)

I have always liked greens. My dad grew up in Arkansas and so my sweet midwestern mother would valiantly try to recreate the meals he loved and remembered, with varying levels of success. Liver and onions, with the liver cooked until it is chewy and tastes like the tongue of a shoe soaked in blood: ewww, yuck. Stewed tomatoes and okra, with the okra so slimy that it is almost impossible to spoon out just one serving from the bowl: no, thank you. A mess of greens, cooked with bacon until the fat turns green and the greens are nearly vapor: yes, please, and I’ll eat my sister’s serving as well.

I have also always felt that every truly good day contains a salad. I had a friend whose family liked to tease their mother about how she could not eat a dinner that didn’t begin with a green salad, no matter where she was or who was paying. They bought her a t-shirt that said “Veni, Vidi, Veggie: I came, I saw, I had a salad.” As a salad lover myself, I wanted one of those shirts and I was sure that EVERYONE would want one. Obviously this was the next great t-shirt, the “I’m with stupid” of the 90s. Strangely, I’ve never seen another one. I guess they didn’t really catch on.

But even though I willingly ate greens (and sopped up the pot liquor with my cornbread) and loved salads, I still needed to be clued in to just how much I liked the green leafy stuff. The next clue came from a woman I met in a series of self-realization type seminars I did. One of the things we were working on at some point was figuring out how to care for ourselves so we could get out there and do all the unreasonable and powerful things we were supposed to be doing all the time. This woman said that she felt best when she ate greens at every meal. At every meal, y’all! My first reaction was, that’s weird. My second reaction, right on its heels, was How would you even know that? and my third reaction, the one that stuck, was I bet I’d feel better if I ate greens at every meal too. It has taken me years to even get close to managing anything like that. (There is one other thing that has stuck with me about this woman, and so I have to share it here because I probably won’t have any reason to bring her up again: she said the word “donkey” as if it rhymed with “monkey.” Seriously, isn’t that odd?)

Finally, what happened is that after my cancer treatments were pretty much finished I started wanting to eat the healthiest diet I possibly could. And I read lots of books that seemed at first to take a lot of the joy out of life. And some of these books are pretty fringey and weird, and some of them are pretty mainstream and well-researched, and a lot of them say the same thing. And one thing they say is that green leafy vegetables are the key to health. And this is not just in the yeah yeah yeah I know eat more vegetables way: some of these people advocate eating TWO POUNDS of green leafy vegetables EVERY DAY. And,  basically, because there is no way to really do that if you have to actually chew every bite, green smoothies are the way to go.

But then it turns out that green smoothies have their own benefits, aside from just making it even remotely possible to eat the amount of greens recommended. For one thing, when you blend the hell out of your greens, you take out some of the work of digestion. This is a boon for people who have difficulty digesting vegetables (many cancer patients fall into this category), people who have trouble chewing or eating large quantities of food (hello, cancer?), and people who simply want to absorb as much nutrition as possible from every ounce of their food.

When it comes to nutrition per ounce, greens are the hands-down winner. They have crazy high nutrient density, which basically means that 100 calories worth of green leafies has more nutrition than 100 calories worth of anything else. It is also a relatively large serving size of food so it’s filling and it can be a lot of work to eat. However, stick that stuff in a high-powered blender, sweeten it with fruit, and stick a straw in it, and you can slurp up more nutrients for breakfast than most people eat in a week.

I started making a green smoothie for breakfast almost every day. It was hard at first, partly because I burned out my trusty old Oster blender in the first week. Also because it is hard to figure out how much produce to buy, how to keep it all fresh, and what combinations will taste good. Luckily for me, the taste is not a huge issue because it turns out that I will drink almost anything that you can pour out of a blender and suck through a straw. And there are lots and lots of recipes available, both on line and in books. And, though I still can’t afford a Vita Mix, the rock star blender for the green smoothie lifestyle, I bought a Breville with a glass pitcher and have learned to live with it. (Many green smoothie lovers also advocate the Blendtec but I don’t like it because the pitcher contains dangerous plastics, and the website has a bunch of research claiming to prove that dangerous plastics are safe. I just hate that.)

Here’s the question everybody asks, and that I don’t know for sure how to answer: what benefits have I experienced from drinking green smoothies?

The first benefits were unexpected and totally clear: by the third day of green smoothies, my chapped lips were smooth and soft, and my fingernails seemed stronger. Soon after that I experienced a welcome change in bathroom habits. The other benefits are harder to define and explain, but I believe that drinking green smoothies is the single best thing I am doing for my health, and I would never want to give it up.

Here are some things I have noticed, that I think come from the greens:

• I don’t crave sweets anymore.
• I don’t experience blood sugar crashes like I always did before. If I get hungry, it’s not a crisis. I can wait a while to eat and hunger has become a pleasant sensation.
• I sleep better, and fall asleep more easily at a reasonable time.
• My teeth feel cleaner, my breath is fresher, and my sweat smells clean.
• My mood is more stable.
• I have a much greater sense of well-being.

In some ways, it’s vague. In other ways, it’s totally clear to me. I love the clean and  bitter taste of greens, I love knowing that I have had half my veggies for the day before 9 am, and I love thinking of all the precious nutrients being released from their cell walls and ready to enter my blood stream through my fancy hand-blown glass straw. It’s better than chemotherapy, I’ll tell you that! It’s virtue in a glass.

And the rats, the lovely pet rats, they really do love the green smoothies. And that gives me a good feeling, too, because I remember some study about how rats wouldn’t eat white flour, and I like to think they are attracted to what is good. It’s also just so cute to watch them pull themselves up on the edge of the glass and take a sip!