What I Did On My Summer Vacation

"Well," the tourist from Oregon said, "I think what I've enjoyed the most about my Maine vacation is being able to see a beautiful sunrise every morning. Oregon is on the West Coast, so we don't get sunrises, only sunsets. There's all of the rest of the country in the way of us seeing the sunrises, ya' know?"

I know. During my vacation over the last week or so, I've come to know a lot of things. The woman from Oregon was browsing the self-help books at Border's. Very appropriate, I thought, if there's a book titled, Getting a Grip on Reality for Dummies. How in the world can you believe that sunrises aren't visible on the West Coast? Maybe she's slept in every morning of her life in Oregon? I'm baffled.

Then there's the woman I met at the auto supply store. She's from Massachusetts and was shopping for wiper blades. "I only need the one," she told me, as we both looked up our cars in the chart they have, "It's the driver's side wiper that wore out, as usual. I guess it's because I drive alone most of the time, so that's the side I use the most." Oddly enough, my own intelligent mother held that belief, and she also firmly believed that using her headlights would run down the battery, so she used her parking lights until it was really dark.

I see a lot of people driving with their parking lights on, which makes me wonder if they have that idea too. I mean, what's the point of driving with just your parking lights on if you don't think that it draws less power from the battery? It's not dark enough for headlights, but it's a little bit dark, so you need a little bit of light? Hey, we're not rooting around in a closet here, holding a penlight and looking for that button that popped off your gray jacket. We're driving.

Headlights are designed to light the road in front of us and to make us visible to other drivers. Parking lights are for - well - for parking. If your son yells that he's gonna throw up from eating two bags of Cheetos and a bag of marshmallows, you pull over and put on your parking lights so that other cars don't crash into you while he goes behind a bush and barfs. (You don't keep your headlights on, because then everyone would see him throwing up and he'd be embarrassed, which he should be after eating all that junk when you told him it'd make him sick.)

I didn't spend all my vacation time talking to tourists. I also made some much-needed improvements around the ol' homestead. I weeded selectively so that our bright blue, wooden garden bench is now surrounded by wildflowers: Queen Anne's Lace, Ox-Eye Daisies, Brown-Eyed Susans, Yarrow, a Swamp Honeysuckle Bush that smells so nice in spring and lots of tansy and comfrey to make the bees happy. One of the wonderful things about wildflower gardens with native wildflowers is that they're already here. I just have to encourage some and discourage others to get it looking the way I want it to look.

Daughter and I also planned our gardens for next year, figuring that we'll do the digging and delving this fall when the weather cools off a bit. I asked her if she had any ideas for what to plant around the big rock that Son dug up and placed in the middle of the backyard.

"How about if we put crustaceans around it?" Daughter asked. "That way, we could still see most of the rock, because crustaceans aren't very tall. And they're red, which would look nice against the rock."

I shook my head to get rid of the mental image that filled it: a dozen boiled lobsters artfully arranged around the rock with seaweed for foliage.

"Uh, I think the smell would get to us after awhile," I said, "Maybe we could plant some pansies or geraniums or something a little more traditional?"

"I like crustaceans," she said, "We could put some in baskets and hang them on the deck too. That way it'd be like a theme. You know, like we saw in that garden book we were looking at the other day. They had crustaceans in window boxes and hanging all over that big white house. It looked really neat."

I was getting dizzy. Admittedly, my memory isn't too hot, but I think I'd remember lobsters in window boxes and hanging all over a house.

"Are you sure it's not carnations or chrysanthemums you're thinking of?" I asked her.

"Mom," she said, "I know what carnations and chrysanthemums are. That's not what I want around the rock. I want crustaceans."

I know when not to pursue things, so I just let the subject languish. Later that night though, I dug out the garden book and found the page with the big white house. It was gorgeous. However, unless lobsters lurked beneath the flowers, there were only nasturtiums in the window boxes and hanging planters.

"So," I said to Daughter at breakfast the next morning, "It's nasturtiums you want around the rock in the backyard."

"Yup, red ones," she said. "Like I told you yesterday. I'm surprised you remember."

So am I.


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