Soppho

I’m pretty sure everyone with a parent has their eye on a piece of furniture in said parent’s house that they’d really love to own. It’s hard to find the right way to put a claim on it, though by God you’ve tried: Hey, Mom, if ever you find that you don’t want that rolltop desk anymore, or find yourself, you know, dead, or something, I’d really love to have it…Stop hiding the cutlery. I swear that was only hypothetical. Seriously, the dinner knives, too?

For me, that’s an old chair that my mom picked up from who knows where, who knows how long ago. The color is terrible, but the shape? Oh my. I’ve been begging for the chair for years. When Mom announced that she was coming down I suggested that the awesome chair in the terrible color might want to come along for the trip. Crickets. Ah well, better luck next time.

And then Mom sent me a text message from the road.

Mom: We are in Pennsylvania!

Me: My condolences to the fine folks of PA.

Mom: Bitch, we just dumped your chair.

She lied, of course, if only because she was determined that since she wedged it into the car, she was not going to be responsible for prying it out again.

And as soon as we set the chair down in the living room and left it unattended for a second, Louie claimed it as his own. I haven’t been allowed to sit in it since. But the cat hair is doing a good job masking the terrible color until I can get it reupholstered.

My new—and hopelessly appropriate—print for the bathroom finally arrived.

Oh, yeah, and my family arrived for a visit, too.

When Y Chrome and I moved in together last year, his family gave us 6 fully-functional, incredibly outdated dining room chairs. I picked out the fabric, Y Chrome stapled it to the chairs, then we both kicked ourselves for not getting around to it, say, 12 months earlier.

It’s so very hard coming back from vacation, but having a freshly washed and hopelessly enthusiastic puppy greet you takes a lot of the sting out of it. Especially when you can take turns chasing each other around the yard.

Y Chromosome and his middle brother rented paddle boards and headed to North Beach on Tybee Island. When I got tired of watching them fall off their boards over and over again, I collected sea shells, spotted a rainbow, and watched a storm come up the coast. And then watched them fall off their boards some more. It doesn’t ever really get old.