This time next week it will be a school day.
That’s right. Summer is gasping its last breath. But really this week is when we kind of get back to real life with school orientations and soccer practice and hair appointments and going to the grocery store to buy real food.
And it’s time. I’ve been playing cruise director for almost three months and, frankly, Julie McCoy is tired. I’m out of money and energy at this point.
But we had a great last hurrah in Port Aransas last week. Even though the last day we were walking down the beach and saw a hammerhead shark washed up on the shore. I’m not even capable of dealing with the implications of this discovery. First of all, I thought hammerheads were just something that lived a long way away from the Texas coast. Secondly, my friend Leslie informed me that hammerhead sharks are listed with three “chomp chomp chomp” shark bites in her son’s book of sharks which is a nice way of saying, “They will eat a person.”
No thank you.
Between that and the stingray occurrence, I have never felt more validated in my decision to perfect the art of sandcastle building on the shore.
We drove home on Friday and made it home that afternoon. P and I commenced to washing and unpacking and doing our best to rid all of our earthly possessions of sand. This is the grownup version of vacation that you don’t know when you’re a kid. That you get home and have to immediately get to work getting all the things done.
And then Saturday was our 17 year wedding anniversary. P spent the day at the ranch with Caroline and the puppies and I spent it in blissful solitude, catching up on various things and projects. Which may just be code for “I watched everything I had recorded on the DVR” but whatever. It was my love language.
While they were at the ranch they came across a rattlesnake. My mind really can’t even process it. Nor the fact that they did an autopsy and discovered it had recently eaten a rabbit. Just ew.
They came home late Saturday afternoon and P brought me a bouquet of flowers. And I’d posted this picture of us on Instagram with the line “17 years today. One child, six dogs, 5,423 hunting trips, a few tears and too many laughs to count later…”
I showed it to him and he asked, “Did you really do the math on how many hunting trips I’ve taken?”
Hi. Do you know me at all? Do I ever do math unless it involves a sale at Anthropologie where 25% off equals dirt cheap?
“No. I didn’t do the math. It was an estimate.”
He got out a calculator and entered in a few numbers before he declared, “It’s actually more like 1,245 hunting trips. Which comes out to 3 1/2 years. I’ve spent 3 1/2 years of our marriage on hunting trips.”
And that, my friends, might be the key to a successful marriage.