"Elenore, gee, I think you're swell ..."

When I was growing up, camping was not on the menu.  Family vacations always happened in hotels, and my sister and I had a serious affinity for the Embassy Suites chain - which, in the 80s and 90s, was a glorified palace of glass elevators, pools, buffet pancake breakfasts and a nightly "manager's reception" (er, happy hour) in the bar for the adults.  My sister and I spent countless evenings swimming and running around the atrium, where there was always a little stream with real koi fish, shimmering amongst the pennies we would toss in, one for each wish.

So enamored were we with the suite-style hotel concept, that once, upon entering a modest Motel 6 room in Rapids City, South Dakota during a Badlands road trip, my pint-sized sister turned to my parents, dumbfounded, and asked, "where the refigerator? Where the microwave?"

Fast-forward to 2015, where it's been decades since I've languished in hotel pools, and I've married a man who willingly (happily!) spends weeks at a time sleeping on the ground and not using a real live toilet.  He wants our small son to grow up with the same beloved camping memories.  Thus, friends, I must learn to camp.

Don't be mistaken, I love being outdoors - I spent the better part of my northern Wisconsin childhood building forts in the woods and swimming in lakes, pulling ticks out of my hair and scratching mosquito bites.  But of course, sleeping in all of that is another matter.  Luckily, Elenore happens to be a good compromise.

After pining away over vintage travel trailers for several years, we found her on a total whim, just 40-ish miles away in Lake Mills, WI.  She was tucked back in the corner of a clean, quiet garage, lovingly cared for by a Shasta collector.  (Shasta basically being the gold standard brand of vintage trailers - jackpot!)

Since she was a 1968 Shasta Compact, we christened her Elenore, after the Turtles' hit song, released in that same year. 

Despite some minor water damage to the main wooden frame, she's in remarkably good condition for a 47 year-old.  The interior is a bit dark, but the customization possibilities are endless!  And I have to admit, I'm in love with that avocado stove.  So 60s.

We definitely have our work cut out for us!  Stay tuned.  ☺️

Thrifted Treasure: Enamel Earrings

My dream image is one taken from both frugality and self-expression; cultivated carefully in resale shops and clearance racks, with the odd opulent piece thrown into the mix for the perfect new/old juxtaposition.  Basically, I dream of the day when someone stops me on the street and asks where i got my (insert clothing item), and I get to reply, flippantly yet humbly, "oh, I found it at a thrift store."  So cheeky.

I've always enjoyed trolling a good "charity shop," as the Brits call it - but recently my lovely friend Melissa introduced me to the joys of doing most of one's clothes shopping via St. Vinny's.  I'm obsessed.  Color-block sweater? $2.  On-trend black and white striped Ralph Lauren top? $5.  Totally over them by next month?  Who cares!  I got them for a fraction of the original cost.

I recently grabbed these lovelies while waiting for the register at the Odana Road St. Vinny's.  I was struck by how rich they look, almost like a round Chanel earring from the 80s - and of course, the anchors are so au courant right now.  The only downside is that they are HEAVY - I felt a bit like I was wearing my late grandmother's fabulous yet gigantic clip-on earrings.  But, for $1.50, I'll muddle through.  ;)

The Evolution of Style, Year 1999.

I've always had lots of fashion girl crushes.  I appreciate women, and just how dang hard it can be to grow up to be one ... so it's just come naturally to me to harbor deep admiration, to compliment strangers freely, to remind girls that they are beautiful and unique and everything else we refuse to tell ourselves on a daily basis.  I remember so many girls who influenced me, though I doubt they realize it.

Laren was in my poetry class Sophomore year of college.  I noticed her shoes before I noticed her; she wore great thick-heeled boots in a shade of chalky pale blue.     Besides her boots, I admired her long, sleek black hair and whiskey eyes.  She was dusky and quiet and fascinating; when she leaned over, into her textbooks, the black curtain of hair concealed a softly squared jaw and almond eyes, like some modern, Tiger Lily, Native American princess who reeked of coffee and lavender and silver rings.  I was amazed.

No one could figure out what the vague poetry professor wanted out of us when she analyzed William Carlos Williams with such fervor, or how to get a genuine iambic pentameter just right.  Nobody, that is, except Laren.  I watched her stand up next to her desk, a bit like a Victorian girl would to recite her spelling words to the schoolteacher ... and she read her poems aloud without the slightest hesitation or question in her voice.  Her legs stood straight in perfectly faded jeans, and the fluorescent classroom lights caught the dark angle of her nose, where a teensy stud cast a pinhole-sized sparkle.  I figured she got an A on that poem.

 

And the next day, I went out and bought my own chalky blue boots.

Watercolors, or Why That One-Hit Wonder Makes Me Cry

In 1995, I was a 14 year-old with braces, crippling shyness and awkwardly-growing-out bangs (no thanks to you, pesky cowlick).  High school loomed large and scary, my clothes never fit quite right, and boys were still a heady mystery.  But for some reason, in my early 30s, I've started to romanticize this time period.  Like, with a vengance.  If anything from the Live "Throwing Copper" album comes on Pandora, I'm practically weepy.  I long for another pair of Doc Martens, fervently wishing that I'd kept the cool bronze pair I wore in the eighth grade.  I miss CDs, rudimentary technology and Jewel.

That summer, I was taking an art class taught by a local artist who was semi-famous; meaning that anyone who was moneyed in town bought her paintings for their living rooms.  She was strikingly beautiful (for a "mom", I remember thinking), with long-ish chestnut hair and a steady voice that never seemed to rise above the same soothing level. She had rented out this little cottage that sat between two homes near the courthouse - it had maybe been a tiny storefront or somebody's workshop many moons ago, but whatever it was, it was adorable.  I can only remember creaky wood floors and late afternoon-sunlit wavy glass. 

We were all supposed to be learning watercolors.  I had a thick pad of fiberous white paper and the prescribed beautiful blue tin box of french paints; it was like a strip of Crayola colors gone cosmopolitan.  Watercolors, real ones, are notoriously tempermental, and I spent most of my time in the little cottage trying to reign in each dripping color with that beautiful European paintbrush.  I painted pink watery flowers, abstract slashes and shaded spheres.  I ripped an ethereal, Venus de Milo-type picture out of a magazine and copied it - it was from a birth control ad, which one of the other teenage students, a frizzy-haired blonde, deigned to loudly point out to the class.  But I was intensely proud of it, with all the blue-toned shading on the nude woman's skin, and the arbitrary flowers held over her mysterious lady parts (it was a birth control ad, after all), and it might still be hanging in my bathroom.

I rode my bike to these lessons, clutching my paintbox over one handlebar and holding the paper tucked under the opposite arm.  And because it was 1995, I still had my Walkman headphones on, usually just set to the Wausau top-40 station.  One night I was biking home, and the sky was flaming with pink and deep yellow and blue - like someone's rose gold jewelry had melted into the clouds.  Some Sophie B. Hawkins song came through my headphones, and when I heard the line about "the whistle of a train on a summer evening", the same thing sounded out from the tracks down the hill, mournfully low but building in intensity as it snaked through town.  I remember stopping and just standing there, thinking how someday I would be grown up and gone and not hearing train whistles while riding my bike anymore.  

Now, feeding my son, watching him awestruck over the most rudimentary things in the room (the ceiling fan takes on legendary status), I have a deep hope that one day, he will have his own version of 1995 to miss.

Minus the bangs.

The Kid

If blogging in the middle of the night is cool, consider me Miles Davis.  (Yes, blatant Adam Sandler-movie-quote-rip-off, but I'm just too damn tired to think of any witticisms of my own).  

The Bub (aka Luca James, aka Supreme Ruler of All Things) has just finished a Dr. Brown's bottle of delicious Sensitive Tummy formula (stay tuned for the inevitable future blogging re: whining over my insecurity about not breastfeeding), and is doing that weird eyes-half-closed baby thing that I'm convinced is a diabolical trick to make me THINK he's asleep.  From down the darkened, 2:30 AM street (bar time, as I can foggily recall), I can hear shouts and shrieks from the sketchy occupants of this ramshackle house that we secretly wish would just burn down.  I have an overwhelming urge to run outside, spit-up stained burp cloth in hand, and furiously reprimand them using my newly acquired mom-superpowers.  Their creepy rusted-out trucks and arrest records don't scare me, nuh-uh.

Two-thirty AM used to be that time you'd get ousted from the bar, tripping out into the pre-dawn hours with cocktails and a million enthusiastically-belted jukebox songs swimming in your head.  Sky-high heels, red lipstick, cigarettes.  Now, it's the only time that I sit still long enough to remember waiting for Luca - how hard it actually was.  The expensive needles and the copious doctor appointments, the miscarriage when I laid on the bathroom floor in my own blood and wondered what it all meant.  The odd thing is, even (finally) feeding my  beautiful son in the middle of the night, I still don't know.  Baby after infertility wasn't the glorious, rainbow-filled daydream I'd pictured - we're still just slogging through these first months like anyone else, trying to get our footing, ready to fall, ready not to.  And that's ok.

New Short Fiction: "Otters"

The coffee shop had some trite, cutesy name like “Cool Beans”, and was full of the quiet chit-chat typical of people who somehow have nothing else to do on a Monday morning besides sit in a coffee shop. I ordered an iced chai latte, because it was blisteringly hot outside, and stared at all of the patrons with their hushed library tones, probably being a little too obvious. My husband says I do this a lot – he's constantly reminding me to stop, in the exasperated voice one might use with a child. I used to be terrified of walking into crowded rooms, or coughing in class – basically anything attracting attention. For some reason, I don't really give a crap anymore; I mean, it's not like I'll ever see these people again. Or so I tell my husband. The interview was across the street, and there were 15 minutes to kill, so took my tea and pushed through the wall of heat outside, condensation beading over the plastic cup on the way to my car. I drove to the office and parked far enough away from its entrance to avoid being seen, or looking creepy, or too eager, or something. I had to leave the car running because it was so hot – a second without air conditioning and my carefully flat-ironed hair would take on a sickly frizz. I punched in 90.7 on the radio, because I like to listen to NPR when I'm nervous, and sipped my watery chai. The job interview was with some guy named Marc Cowell. I'm wary of anyone who spells 'Mark' with a 'c'. The possibility of meeting a pretentious douchebag increases by about half. I'm always lamenting not being interviewed by more women – in the past three years I've talked almost exclusively with men, which makes me feel like I'm trying to get a job as a Pan-Am stewardess in 1960. The job was for an athletic magazine, which is a study in irony, because I'm profoundly un-sporty. I really just want to be holed up in some office correcting other people's horrible punctuation. Bliss. I walked into the office at 10 AM on the dot, clutching my portfolio and pasting a smile on my face. The walls were covered in large, framed blow-ups of past magazine covers – sinewy runners, swimmers in intense butterfly-arcs and flat-chested gymnasts who most likely never got their periods stared me down from their places of honor. The receptionist took my name without fanfare, phoning Marc Cowell to let him know that I'd arrived. He was, of course, on the phone, and the awkward wait that was de rigueur at each interview followed. The secretary said something banal about the weather, to which I responded politely, shifting my weight on the chair to appear more interested. Since I'm always in dresses at interviews, I'm constantly adjusting my sitting position to come across as perky, polite, exuberant and ladylike. Hello, Pan Am stewardess. When Marc Cowell finally came out, he had a Bluetooth accessory in his ear and was wearing those black-framed glasses that 40-something men wear to remind you that they used to go to Pixies concerts and are indeed still hipsters. Still, he had a decent handshake, so at least that was something. He made a half-assed apology about the phone call and ushered me to his office, looking harried and not at all interested in conducting a job interview. “I'm sorry, I've just had one hell of a morning. I've been on and off the phone with my ex-wife, my kids - “ Of course. Divorced aging hipster. But still trying to be relevant – or so I figured, as my eyes took in his Wilco poster. “ - otters, it's crazy. Attacked by otters.” I tried so hard not to laugh. I bit my tongue and I think I tasted blood. “Wow . . . were they at the zoo?” It was all I could think of to say. “No! Swimming in some goddamn lake up North.” My husband and I have this theory that everyone should get one consequence-free day a year - at that very moment all I could think was that if today were my Consequence-Free Day, I would rip that Bluetooth out of his ear and ask what kind of moron lets their kids swim with otters. But it wasn't, so I didn't. Marc Cowell had 30s film stills on the walls, and I took the liberty of commenting on his Maltese Falcon 5x11 print. But thenI wished I hadn't, because he launched into some pompous diatribe about film noir, and I had to sound pleasantly surprised when I tilted my head and exclaimed, “no, I didn't know that Fred MacMurray was in Double Indemnity, way before his My Three Sons days!” I jiggled my feet, so out of place in their chic black ankle boots, and watched Marc lean back in his chair, tenting his long fingers. He wore one of those Charlie Sheen bowling shirts and sandals with white socks. “So what kind of sports do you like?” I told him I liked yoga. It seemed like a bit of a stretch, but it was all I had. He flipped through my portfolio, which I couldn't help but notice that he'd accepted reluctantly from my eager outstretched hand. I'd been so proud of it, in it's leather-bound case, until now – now I felt like a kindergartner presenting a sheaf of sticky artwork. “Have you ever thought about writing style articles?” He forged ahead before I could state the obvious, and held up a blog entry on 60s fashion and Tuesday Weld. “Who's she?” “ I wanted to scream back, 'nobody that Fred MacMurray ever worked with', but he had already stood up and was collecting a handful of papers. “Just a brief editing test. You can work on it in an empty office.” I leafed through the “brief” proofreading text, rife with purposeful misspellings and incorrect punctuation. I dug a Dixon Ticonderoga pencil – my favorite – from my bag as we walked. Somehow that little pink-tipped eraser with it's tinsel-shiny green accents always comforted me. I'm not sure why, but I think it's because my eighth-grade English teacher handed them out at Christmas. The office was tiny, with a fake-wood desk and one narrow floor-to-ceiling window covered by those cheap plastic vertical blinds. Fairly hideous, but I could almost imagine making it my own – plants, pictures, NO Wilco posters. My stomach burned nervously at the thought, and I entertained it, just for a minute. That had become about all I had, those quick little fantasies. They shivered up my spine and wormed into my brain, where they floated around for awhile. Marc fiddled with his ear piece and leaned over the desk. “So, it's pretty self-explanatory - the last page is just some current events trivia.” He cracked a half-smile. “I like to stump people.” You could tell he thought that was pretty cute. "Well, good luck." He flipped open his cell phone and closed the door. I looked at the page, suddenly swimming with misplaced semi-colons and run-on sentences. I was really, really sick of 'good luck'.

Yes, Virginia, people do cry in Barnes & Noble.

I really don't want this to become an infertility blog. There are so many great ones out there, written with sensitivity and panache by ladies and gentlemen who are really out there in the IF trenches ("Stirrup Queens" and "Maybe if You Just Relax", I'm talkin' to you), that I don't feel the need to start jabbering ad nauseum about my lady parts. Or sperm samples. Or creepy, cold specula. But there are days when something will hit me in the gut and remind me of my baby-less state, days that just goad me into penning an IF post. It's not that I WANT to be that girl who waves her arms and cyber-shouts, "read my infertility rant!". I'd really rather write about DIY or this fabulous pair of sequined Doc Martens I found on Pinterest. But seriously, read my infertility rant. Joe (although I do indeed love him dearly, I refuse to refer to him by the colloquial IF-community blog term, DH, or "dear husband" - barf) and I carpool most days to save gas money on our daily half-hour commute. This arrangement usually gives me some time to kill before work, and I'll usually spend it at Barnes & Noble - because I could drop serious amounts of cash in that Liber Libri paradise. This morning I was nosing around for books on the IVF process, because reading about how a doctor is going to aspirate ovum through my vaginal wall is just how I get my kicks these days. I went to the Pregnancy and Childbirth section and was doing that sideways-head-tilt thing at all the book spines, when an employee approached me to ask if I needed help. I verbalized my request, and she gave me a slightly (or was it just me?) perplexed look. "You'll have to go to the Health and Self-Help section." I couldn't help drawing on the oft-used but never not funny Pretty Woman shopping-joke ("I don't think we have anything here for you. Please leave.") as I trudged to the bookshelves in question. Health and Self-Help, that's me. Much like Vivian the kind-hearted hooker, I didn't belong in the Pregnancy and Childbirth section. Sigh. After selecting a book and claiming one of those big, comfy chairs that nearly always seem to be next to some jackass on his cell phone, I flipped to the last chapter - the one right before the helpful but repetitive glossary of IF terms (is "holy-effing-expensive" in there?). Because that's what I do. I have an insatiable need for success stories. After some blah, blah injectables, blah, blah, beta levels, I found the Miracle Baby Chapter. I was reading about the titular magic baby snuggling with the homemade blanket his mother knitted long, long ago - before IF was even on her mental radar - and started thinking about the pastel cotton crocheted thing I never quite finish, and then I'm drippy-teary-eyed in the stupid Barnes & Noble, of all places. So I put the book away and headed out into the glaring morning sun, and decided to maybe pick up that blanket-in-progress again, and keep plugging away at it. Because when it really comes down to it, that's all any of us can do.