I’m afraid we’ve reached the point in summer where each blog entry may read, “Today we woke up at 7:00 a.m. We went to swim practice. We came home. We watched fourteen episodes of River Monsters on T.V. The end.”
But I’ll try for more.
Yesterday we woke up at 7:00 a.m. We went to swim practice. We came home.
Oh. Wait.
Caroline has decided her new favorite thing after swim practice is to go to Starbucks for hot chocolate and then come home and put on her fleece footy pajamas until she warms up. But she doesn’t complain about being cold while she’s actually at practice so I guess I’ll consider that a victory.
Yesterday morning I think she was still exhausted from all the weekend activity and really didn’t move from the couch except for about an hour that we went to lunch with Mimi and Bops, made a quick trip to HEB and then ran by Gap because shorts are 30% off and she was in desperate need.
And then we watched more episodes of River Monsters and I will forevermore live in fear of encountering a snakehead fish.
(I also saw some type of stingray that was as big as my living room. Needless to say, I’m sticking to chlorinated water this summer.)
P came home around 4:00 and we were sitting in the kitchen catching up on the day when Caroline announced she thought someone had just knocked on the front door. I went to look to see if anyone was there and saw an older lady walking away down our front steps, so I opened the door and she immediately turned and came back up the steps with her arms outstretched as she exclaimed, “TAYLOR!!! THERE YOU ARE!!” and pulled me into a hug.
There were several problems with this scenario.
1. I had no idea who this lady was.
2. She appeared to know exactly who I was which made me wonder if I was supposed to know her.
3. My name isn’t Taylor.
4. I was being embraced by a woman I didn’t know.
And here’s the thing. I felt bad that I wasn’t Taylor. I desperately wanted to be Taylor just to save this woman the embarrassment of realizing I wasn’t Taylor. There was a small co-dependent part of me in the back of my mind that was wondering if I could just fake my way through an entire encounter of being Taylor. Taylor, who this woman felt comfortable enough to hug but yet doesn’t know well enough to know she’s hugging the wrong person.
Then she said, “Is the house ready? The clients are going to be here any minute to look!”
At the moment I realized I had one of two choices. I could hurriedly clean my house and let some total strangers look at it even though it’s not for sale or I could confess that I wasn’t Taylor.
So I said, “Ma’am? I think you have the wrong person.”
And she replied, “Is this not 440? Is your house not for sale?”
“No ma’am. It’s not.”
“Well, I wish it was. It’s just darling. Call me if you ever want to list it.”
In that moment I kind of wanted to let her list my house even though we’ve never talked about moving because she was just so nice and I loved the way she waved goodbye to me as if we were old friends and she’d dropped by on purpose. I appreciated her air of confidence and complete nonchalance in light of the fact she’d just hugged a strange woman, called her Taylor and asked if her house was clean.
That’s the kind of scenario that has the potential to send me to therapy or, at the very least, hours of self-loathing. But she embraced it.
I closed the front door and walked back inside. P asked, “Who was that?”
“I don’t know.”
P said, “You were hugging her.”
“I know. She thought I was Taylor and was trying to sell our house.”
“I’m so confused.”
“Well, not as confused as her.”
And that was pretty much the highlight of our day.