Wednesday at five o’clock we got to our cottage – an extremely swanky affair made up entirely in shabby chic, accented with genuine nautical items (including huge, heavy portholes, my husband already broke one) and equipped with HE washer and dryer, stainless steal gadgets, a master bathroom with a jacuzzi tub and, in the other bathroom, a shower “stall” larger than my bathroom at home with one of those dinner-plate sized showerheads to pour a steaming hot waterfall over your head. So yeah: luxury. Today putting the picture-perfect pies on their picture-perfect cookie sheet into the picture-perfect GE gas range (cost: one million dollars) I remarked, “Wow, I feel like I’m baking in a Sunset Magazine kitchen.” It’s kind of gross, actually.
Yesterday during a biking outing in Cannon Beach we heard the electrical lines popping over our head; the entire town lost power for a couple hours. We took this opportunity to head into Seaside – a weird carny-like town my mother and I both carry an instintive suspicion toward – to find lunch (sushi!) and visit the aquarium, where I learned the Spanish for my favorite aquatic animal (pulpo) and my mom showed up as if by magic to find us there.
A multi-generational holiday can be a wonderful thing – if one can get past the myriad annoyances, like oh say for example this morning my mom waking me up by um, passing gas, loudly and repeatedly, and then locking herself out of the house, and then banging on the door repeatedly to wake me up to let her in (Billy! Do you or do you not see how tempting it is to treat her like a cartoon bear?). It seems like when the babies were younger my extended family helped out in their care so little; they’d take the kids for a forty-five minute walk and come back all flustered over the production (which I always found amusing; here I was used to doing this most of my days, every day). Now the kids seem to mostly mind themselves so friends and family invite them along: on walks, to the grocery store, and in town to Art Guild meetings. Life as a larger family seems to have settled into a mostly peaceful one.
We eat at 6 PM tonight, cornicopia and all.