Summer

”If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito” – Betty Reese

I’m hopeful and hoping that I’ll be moving into the new place sometime in June. Two steps forward, one step back. When we pulled the tape from the crown molding and baseboards in the living room, it pulled the new flat paint and sheet rock paper right off the wall. Huge rips now, spanning the clean lines of classic light buff But, well, the crown molding is painted. Some previous occupant had painted latex over oil-based paint and it’s impossible to prep the baseboards for painting. So we ripped them off the wall and will replace them.. hopefully this weekend.

I have been trying, throughout the week, to steal lunch hours, breaks and time after work to make bits of progress in the place. If I commence on the kitchen, the last room to be reckoned with before moving in, by this weekend, I feel like I’ll be achieving some kind of meaningful momentum on the project. We’ve decided that we’ll continue to use the bathroom in the back cottage, even after we move in, and not begin the remodel work on that bathroom until after we’re settled in. Maybe that’s foolish – but at least I’m deciding what kind of fool I’ll be.

I look forward to a weekend when all there is to do is a speck of gardening and an adventure with Secret Agent Dog to the beach at Bolinas. We haven’t been yet at all this year and I’m in withdrawal. I miss the ablutions of summer. And I decided, by the way, that yesterday was officially the first day of summer. Not the day I spied the young rattlesnake, but yesterday. It was hot. It was really hot. It was windless and oppressively hot and the trees were still moist and neon green of spring and it was hot. I ate popsicles and didn’t cook dinner.

This weekend we’re supposedly invited to the annual Memorial Day pool party at the friend-of-a-friends house in Terra Linda. The wealthy women who had their lap pool airlifted (okay, they used a crane) into the back yard. I tried to wrangle an invitation to use the pool for months afterwards last year and then surrendered defeat. This year the friends invited us and then said, oh, we have to check to see if it’s okay that we bring you. Which makes the invitation seem like less than an invitation. I feel like I’m waiting to be picked by a team for a dodge ball game and I don’t even like dodge ball.

On Friday the big meeting begins at work – to decide organizational fate. I guess all the negativism I feel in my words (and bones) stem from a sense of doom and dread about these conversations, this process and the decision(s). People will be laid off as a result of decisions – the trajectory of people’s lives will take some dramatic twists and turns. While at some level I’m at peace with the whole thing – I’m just not ready to launch. I hate the waiting but I hate the beginning too. Hate is a strong word and it doesn’t serve.