Dawn and I started to see the rest of our lives unfold and it was interconnected with this house, this yard. A matter of ongoing refinement, settling in.

I had no business eating this cheese but didn’t want to waste it. It was aged to begin with so how could it get any worse?

I got really jacked up on caffeine and then ping ponged through the house and yard, in and out of it weeding, watering, snacking on the bad cheese. I kept the phone in my pocket at all times to not miss anything. If you stood by the base of the cherry tree you could wait for the fruit to fall and track the sound of the thump then check if it had been punctured by a bird or was still good.

I love bulking up before a backpacking trip. This morning for breakfast I had two leftover chicken thighs with a tahini-honey lemon sauce, sourdough toast with the last of the blueberry jam, flapjacks and butter, maple sausage—all of that on top of the fallen cherries and bad cheese. A banana too. I felt like a homesteader or lumberjack, the bourgeois kind.

Dawn’s nephew gave me a pair of low crotch, wide leg, spruce-colored hippy pants with a large heron stretched up one thigh. I loved going to our suburban grocery store like that, in my Uggs and those pants. No one does that. Dawn’s nephew and his posse came back late Sunday from their music festival to crash at our place again, to shower and do laundry. We kept some of their fruit and milk in our fridge while they had gone but most of it went bad.

We live close enough to the lake we can hear the sound of people laughing and swimming and the lifeguard barking deadpan through the megaphone. It was surprising how clearly I could hear them in the water though the lake was a ways away. Our yard was like a park too with the tall trees in the back.

There were almost ten people in our house at one time yesterday though it felt like more, and good to have that much life and joy and family around, but not so good when I was preparing for an interview. I couldn’t be present with any of them and instead hung to the periphery fiddling, that nervous energy thing.

The hiring manager was about two minutes late for the call and I wondered if somehow the link had taken me to the wrong place. That never happens, though I’d forwarded the invite from one alias to another; it’s just how the mind works when it’s terrified.

I tried not to think about how important it was for me to get this job with both Dawn and me recently unemployed, or the fact that I’d botched my last interview. But that time the hiring manager had the nerve to interview me against another candidate in the same video call, without actually copping to it. She claimed she wanted two contractors but then only picked one of us. I clued in to that midway and it messed with my head. Then I lodged a formal complaint to my agency, something about not wanting to feel like a horse having its teeth examined. But that’s the deal. Soon machines will be doing it.

Two white Teslas tried to pass me coming home today at a choke point at the top of the hill where the lanes merge. I was in my black Mercedes and just had it washed. I did not let them pass and both hung back ominously in my rear view mirror like floating white pills, reminding me of The Matrix, the scene where the evil AI Agent Smith self-replicates into an army of Smith clones. You can’t see the drivers behind the windshields is the thing. And that cold sound the engines make.

We wound up not going to Mt Rainier with Lily and her former-boyfriend-now-boyfriend again. Instead we went east to an alpine lake, the same one I’d taken her to years ago. I brought smoked salmon like that first time and offered it to the two of them but the bugs were bad and we didn’t dwell there for long. Coming down I had that it-all-goes-by-too-fast feeling. And like summertime, it always would now.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: aging, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest, parenting