Before this gets going let me set the record straight. I hate washing used ziplocks. This admission should be enough for some of the Reduce-Reuse-Recyclers if they get past the admission that I own ziplocks. Glad ziplocks mind you and yes, go ahead and cue the shrieks and finger pointing. But I do re-wash them, or as I reminded my child recently as he did the dishes and said What's up with this plastic bag in the water, replying in that mom voice I swore I’d never deploy, Ziplocks or food, which do you think we'll want to eat next week?
Some people have life lists with the conventional must-dos, like go to the Grand Canyon, or the ones that people will think they are nuts for wanting to do, implying their life will have meant more if they get to the end and can look back at all those been-there-done-thats: skiing to the north pole or jumping out of an airplane in the middle of nowhere and eating gooey grubs dug from stumps for a weekend to prove they can go it solo. Ostensibly as long as they are willing to pay the outdoor adventure company the twenty-grand for the experience.
My list is nothing like that. You can keep your deprivation and hairy armpits for three weeks and char-grilled rattlesnake. You folks with the brochures for body-surfing in the Seychelles, okay, that does sound nice, but not on my life list either. All those years as a guide gave me lots of opportunities to swim buck naked in emerald green pools, free-climb in bare feet to see ancient cliff art and dried corn cobs, douse myself with river water to the tune of 20,000 cubic feet per second in a teeny raft through rapids so big they eclipsed daylight.
My life list is a sofa list. And we're not talking an Ikea $300 number though those are certainly cute and clever. I have made do for 25 years with a curvy model that has been slipcovered in brown toile via duct tape, strewn with various quilts and blankets, and mostly, cat fur. It’s the sofa I was reclining on when my four year-old asked if I wanted spa mommy and just as I closed my eyes heard metallic snips and felt a lightness as a chunk of my hair went airborne, and the sofa that Easter egg we never did find lived in for two years. It’s had dog and cat and human urp, been bleached to faded denim smithereens, been stuffed into the back of a Land Rover, and numerous beverages laugh-snorted onto it.
Long ago I made love and fantasized about sofas, about the perfect slipcover, about those timelessly chic George Smiths with the sexy, spindly wooden legs. By all means feel free to tell my ex-husband.
Which came to mind (the sofa not the ex) as I drove home from my son's third-grade class overnighter at a place where pioneer life is replicated down to the missing electrical outlets, cooking on a wood fire, mucking out stinky animal stalls, stiff-lipped school marm and no espresso in the morning for the chaperones. A living history kind of experience, which was mostly fun because it was new and different but also, not easy, for the same reasons. This was long enough ago I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be allowed today.
After eating oatmeal to plaintive cries of What? this is all? for breakfast (also a chorus of where's the milk/oj/hot cocoa?) then chores in the barn for an hour, washing up before classes in the one-room schoolhouse, the little darlings were jonesing for snacks. But pioneer chirruns they had no snacks, no rice crispie treats or juice boxes, and no whining either, as our dear ones were reminded: complaining meant more mucking or hoeing the garden or water from the (tbh, scary) well.
Life was hard and work, and children were for work; that is, part of the game plan, as contributing members of each family, not just couch potato baby birds with their beaks open crying feed me while they watch Hannah Montana reruns.
And I loved it, oh I loved it. Not just the kids working and making do without light switches and automatic ice dispensers, but because it was fun to pretend the way it was and when that rooster crowed at 4am I wanted to be up and at’em in the animal barn. I wanted to be getting on with a day that, though finger-to-the-bone at the least, made sense: much more sense than life skills via Nintendo or Scooby snacks, little league and soccer, playdates, the life-as-entertainment model we lock-step straight into and believe our kids require.
Until about lunch the second day and then I began to have cravings.
I remember cravings from my days as a river guide, especially the winter trips when the water in the wash buckets would be frozen solid and we would huddle around the fire to stall getting back into the boats and one too many wake up calls at thirty-two degrees, me with no wetsuit booties because they cost thirty bucks. We'd scan the hillsides for a spot of sun, have some excuse to hike to it to feel something warm; the time I bathed in a hot spring disguised as a puddle of lukewarm water on the side of the river, day twenty of no bathing on a rain-every-day trip. The trips when I would fall onto my sleeping bag without a bite of dinner, after rowing twenty miles and all the other guide duties, because fledgling guides eat last and if there is nothing left but the brocolli water after it was steamed, count yourself lucky.
I would dream of cake: devil's food. With chocolate frosting. Brownies suffocated by ice cream. Ice in a drink! a drink I did not have to pump out of a slow filter, stand in line behind ten other people in the broiling sun to do it. But it was over in time, two weeks for a commercial trip, maybe three for the river research crews I worked on, and back to civilization. Hot showers, somebody handing me a plate loaded with food somebody else had cooked and somebody else would wash. Depletion but also, abundance. Beautiful, fabulous, under-rated abundance, there for the taking when the experience was over.
At Pioneer Farm I recognized the cravings, though with a child in tow the slant was edgier, a field trip to pretendlandia of making-do is maybe a wee bit close for comfort to the cliff edge of no return; it is salt on the proverbial wound when making do is your back home 24/7 gig. And let me say this: making-do sucks. Recycling the ziplock for the twenty-fifth time and thinking how can I squeeze two more meals out of these eggs, and put on another sweater, tell your child $1 is too much for one cookie, that we make our own cookies and aren't we so lucky to even be able to still do that? Yes, we were, and are, lucky. Yes, it is not a FEMA trailer or something, many things, scarier, more making-do with nothing, than ours. But I am human, and so it does suck to be surrounded by so many wonderful things and to try not to think I need this or even I just want that; especially when there is the Sofa List and damn it, it's only a Crate and Barrel sofa, not an Italian custom down-stuffed handsewn job with the big, crazily big, number on the price tag.
You get the cravings because you start thinking of home and what you have, and then because we are all only human, what we have leads to what me might have, and thus what we want to have. One life with everything, plz.
I thought of home and making a home, and what I want and hope for my family. When I took a deep breath and looked at it, it was a life with sharp edges, wonky springy-things poking through from time to time, hard things pointing us to feel the joy in the soft middle parts.
Even if it is a slip-covered, nobody else might want it this way but it is ours, life.
I don't want to comment on your duct tape skills, I want to rave about your writing skills, your blink'in wisdom, your sheer wonderful person-ness! What an essay. Proud to live even in the same state as you, MacKenzie!
Oh and by the way, my wife wants me to tell you she's almost stopped washing ziplocks. Me, I just reuse them without washing them!
Eeeuw!