This morning at 7:30 I slip out from between my two children as they sleep. Like magnets they click together and resume their mutual slumber. Into the kitchen, start the coffee. Turn up the heat. For the second morning in a row, I stand at the window of my sewing room and smoke a half a cigarette. I take a quick shower, wipe down the bathroom floor, and put my clothes and towel in the laundry.
I peek in the bedroom and my children still sleep. In the kitchen, still in my towel, I make and put a puff-pankcake in the oven and set the timer. I have been baking hot food for breakfast the last few days, too. Yesterday was corn pudding, the extra portions of which I shared with two good friends.
Today I will be in charge of finishing packing the family’s clothes and toiletries, rolling up freshly-washed sleeping bags and putting the rain boots in the car. I will also balance our checkbook, finish the laundry (which includes, rather oddly, a large rubber snake that was inadvertantly peed on by Nels), put cat food and water out, buy our Thanksgiving groceries (mercifully only a two-store stop), pick up a gift for my sister’s birthday and wrap it, and buy buttons and ribbon for clothes I finsi. And maybe – just maybe, if I have time – finish sewing a pair of pants for my son.
Today after my husband gets off work we will venture out on Highway 101 for an hour and a half’s drive to my family’s cabin at Mason Lake. My great-grandfather built it, and it’s a log fucken cabin – not a “cabin” that is actually a cute little condo (although many of our neighbors have “upgraded” to such forms of vacation dwellings). I have mixed feelings about the cabin. Amongst them are an antipathy toward the legacy of my grandmother’s (gone four years now) authoritarian regime and grandfather’s (my lone surviving grandparent) patrician assholian nature. I also feel a slight skin-crawl at my own mother’s crowing pride at the place, which is really a kind of ugly lumpy edifice and includes such things as a “deer-hoof coatrack”. But I am still glad it’s there and if it passes out of my family’s hands in this lifetime I will miss it.
As I type this the house is filling with an eggnog-y smell and hums with the dryer. Sometimes I wish I could wake up to a mom in the house.