I was tidying the kitchen before heading to bed, thinking about everything we still needed to pack in order to leave the next day, when Jim came downstairs, glowing. “Look!" he said, holding out a ring of the fuzzy dark gold mohair Lucy had gotten in the Bazaar Girls free bin, with strips of metallic thread glimmering through it. “I made you a present!”
I ooohed dutifully, and put it on. It tickled. A lot. “It’s very pretty,” I said. “And a little ticklish.” Then I had an idea. “You try it!” I said, slipping it on his wrist. He struck a pose, putting the hand with the bracelet on the hip of his rust-red shorts, and giving me a deadpan pout. I grinned. “Perfect. Really, it’s so you.”
Jim squirmed. “It is a little ticklish.”
“It’s a hair bracelet. Like hair shirts the monks used to wear to mortify their flesh. But also gorgeously hipster. Really, you should have it.”
“This has kind of backfired,” he said. “I meant to pawn it off on you, but it came back to me.”
When I was going to bed, I heard Jim whispering to Lucy in the girls’ bedroom as he handed her Test Bracelet No. 2, this one in a non-fuzzy cotton yarn that was a mix of white, blue, and pale purple. I could hear her voice, sleepy and delighted.
I woke up the next morning to a bellow from Naomi. “I WANT A BRACELET!!!” I rolled over toward Jim, who was dead to the world, the way he is when he’s stayed up late.
I got up, poured the girls cereal (using a mom-and-child-pleasing trick I learned from my friend Amanda: big scoop of plain cheerios topped with small scoop of candy cereal). I set out the milk for them, and waited as they picked out the candy cereal (this batch is a berry one from Trader Joe’s) and sorted it by color, before pouring milk on the cheerios. I noticed gratefully that they seem to have outgrown the Cereal Wars, which began one time when the candy cereal was Lucky Charms. They’d sort out all the charms and then launch into a violent bicker about who had how many of what.
An hour later, I felt like I’d been working my tail off—alternating between helping the girls with big feelings, breaking up fights, attempting to teach them to help, and trying to move the camping things into the car—without making meaningful progress. When Jim showed up, proudly bearing a slightly lumpy cup cozy made from the ball of chunky taupe blanket yarn I had given him the night before, I was not feeling cheerful. He slid it snugly on the green stainless cup, then went down and filled the cup with coffee (and heavy cream) before bringing it back. “How do you feel about this as a birthday present?”
My birthday was coming up on Tuesday, when we’d be packing up from camping. I opened my mouth after Jim asked me about the hand-crocheted cozy as a present, caught off guard. Coffee sounded delightful. I was still stuck in frustration over the slowness of packing, and in wishing he’d been helping with the packing instead of crocheting. But now I also felt guilty for not being grateful, if this was a present. My answer came out tangled and sounding sullen even to me. “Fine, I guess.” Then, “As long as I also get to go hiking with Beverly.” She and I had hatched this plan earlier in the summer. My birthday is the same day she was declared cancer-free a year before I met her. She calls it her Cancer Birthday. We’d decided to celebrate both our birthdays by going on a full-day hike somewhere in the Mt. Hood wilderness, and I’d told Jim that what I wanted for my birthday was kid cover for the hike.
Jim looked crestfallen. I felt guiltier, and more frustrated, and before I knew it we were in fight 103.6, our favorite fight in photo negative: after having done most of the work for the camping trip, Jim was outraged that I begrudged him five hours of crocheting after the girls were in bed. And I felt blindsided by the project, and alone in the home stretch of camping prep, when I was already tired. Words were exchanged. The camping trip nearly went off the rails. But somehow, we ended up in the car, packed to the gills, with a huge bag of coloring books and markers balanced (by Lucy) on top of the already teetering pile between the girls’ car seats. I drove, and Jim read Leonard: My Life as a Cat out loud.
Leonard is fantastic. It’s about an incorporeal immortal alien who tries to visit Earth embodied as a human, but makes a mistake and becomes a cat instead. We giggled over Leonard having a conversation with a dog about howling when distressed (“You will feel better if you a-woo.”)
I enjoyed heading out of town on back roads, watching the houses get cheaper, weirder, and farther apart before giving way to fast food joints, gas stations, box stores and then farmland. Even the traffic lights felt fun; I went out of my way to get a stick shift when I was hunting for this car (the first I’ve ever owned) twelve years ago, and I felt pre-nostalgic about shifting. If the girls have kids, and I live to see it, I may be trying one day to explain the mechanics of a clutch to children who’ve never been in a non-electric car.
We got to the park, which was bigger than I expected; it took almost ten minutes of driving inside the park before we got to Group Campsite 1, with a big roofed eating area, where there was already a clump of boys clustered around a chess board at the end of one of the picnic tables.
We set up our tent. There it stood, somewhat awkwardly; when Bev invited us to put it between hers and Tanya’s, I don’t think she realized how big it was. But Jim had wanted one he can stand in, and he’s 6’4”, so it towered between the dome tents like a three-story quad-plex plunked into a neighborhood of polite and (previously) contented little cottages. In its defense, it is the friendliest warm yellow you’ve ever seen, like a portable palace made of sunshine.
We ate our camping caprese sandwiches for dinner, and they were as good as I hoped. We started making friends with a new family. The ice cream social happened. Everyone had packed theirs in all the ice they could spare, but they were nonetheless all liquefying, which meant they needed to be eaten quickly, which was not a problem. Someone brought Ben & Jerry’s Double Fudge, and I filled a cup for Jim, who had said he’d come “when the rush died down," and was not there by the time nearly all the tubs were empty. I took it to him, and he did much better than I had with the cozies. “Oh, wow,” he groaned, rolling his eyes back. “I had kind of thought I didn’t need ice cream but I definitely needed this.”