Friday is a carbon copy of Wednesday with the post-dinner ice cream at the DQ—same order and procedure pulling into the same parking spot, spooning it with the windows down—except on Friday the queer, wildfire smoke sun is back, the one that’s Pepto-Bismol pink, end-days like.

I mow the lawn with the tractor which isn’t even needed but feels calming and normal, like I can pretend I’m not sick still after a week, can maybe get some direct light. But mowing the lawn without a mask feels dumb with Covid and the wildfire smoke and whatever weird hay fever shit is floating around with the grimy grass and dead leaves. When I’m done you can’t even tell it’s cut. I pull up all the mole traps (empty) and wear Playtex gloves so I don’t get my scent on the steel.

Charlotte has used some kind of sidewalk chalk to paint SENIOR 2026 on the back window of her/our car, with stick figures of her two friends (Mattea, Rosie) and her in the middle. It’s kind of touching and sweet. I realize, driving to the Dairy Queen and past her high school, that Charlotte gets to relish in this whole senior thing in a way Lily never did since Lily went to a boarding school that focused more on credit recovery and just getting kids through vs. experiencing it normally. And that’s kind of sad. But awesome for Charlotte (and us) to go all-in on the senior lore.

This week my new job had me finally doing some writing, wrapping up week 5. Thankfully it was low-stakes copy editing for the web. My colleague and I were given copy for “polishing” but then learned the character limits were 135 w/spaces which is like just two lines. And boy was that fun ditching all those unneeded words (sorry, character limits!). This German software company actually sounds German in the ultra-precise way they like to describe their technical features and AI. I hope it doesn’t affect my writing style. The best way I can describe it is mechanical.

Charlotte’s friend Rosie is living with us now until the end of the school year; she moved in to Lily’s room and Dawn spent all last week boxing Lily’s things up (we forgot Lily had drawn a female breast on the wall and covered it with a poster). Dawn got balloons for Rosie when she moved in but the balloons scared the hell out of our cat Timmy for reasons no one understands. He wouldn’t go downstairs for a day and shit in our bathtub. We moved the balloons to Dawn’s office which is acting as a natural deterrent now to keep him out of her space. He can be hard, the way he gets into things. We have a battery-powered sensor/canister thing on the ledge behind the wood stove that shoots a burst of dubious chemical spray when activated and use a water bottle in the den but it’s like some game that repeats itself every morning and frankly, it’s not fun.

This morning I let our old dog Ginger out but then didn’t see her come back and worried maybe she’d wandered off again, and got mildly peeved about it, not feeling well enough to go roaming the neighborhood but figured I should, then had enough time to consider her actually dead and what that would be like, before returning to her there on the sofa snoozing next to Dawn. Kind of ticked off and relieved. She just looked up once and went back to sleep.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Diary, parenting, writing

Tags: humor, Memoir, pacific northwest