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Archives from 2002-2006

We’ve been traveling a lot during the weekends over the summer and this past weekend was the first time in a while we’d decided to stay home and relax. Or more specifically, I decided to stay home and relax, while JB decided to tackle a bunch of projects. He’s been working long hours during the week so he had some backup, like stacking a massive amount of firewood in our recently-build structure.

He worked on this at various times during both Saturday and Sunday, while I pulled up a chair nearby and sat with a book. It wasn’t until late yesterday afternoon, after I’d closed my eyes for a half-nap and idly complained about our September heat wave that I sort of realized I hadn’t bothered to help at all. Like not even once did I pick up a single piece of wood. Meanwhile, he was coated head to foot in splinters and dirt while the woodshed steadily filled with fuel that would help keep my lazy ass warm during the winter.

I apologized, more for not even thinking of helping than the fact that I didn’t actually do so, but then I thought of something a friend had told me recently that I greatly enjoyed. She said she’d had a fling with a hot MMA fighter. Nothing serious, but he had this super-smoking body straight out of a men’s magazine, abs you could play in an old-timey jug band, that kind of thing. She said, “You know how sometimes when you’re sticking to a healthy diet and you’re working out and you just get that tantrumy sort of feeling about it all, like where’s my damn medal for having fucking salad? Linda, he was my medal.” This made me laugh and laugh, and that’s how I ended up justifying not helping with the firewood. I pictured every thankless, cyclical household task that I’m solely responsible for — laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping, cooking — and I decided having three cords of wood put away while I essentially reclined with a box of bonbons was my medal.

It turns out I was wholly justified in my inactions, too. Later I found a dirt-smeared towel just sort of tossed over the shower curtain rod in the bathroom and when I asked JB about it, he said he was sorry but he didn’t know where to put it. You guys. My HUSBAND didn’t know where to put a SOILED TOWEL. I’m running that stove 24/7 this December just because.

I remember when we first looked at our house and I was blown away by all the trees and plants in the backyard. Mature landscaping I don’t have to add to, I thought happily. And an honest-to-god orchard! How charming!

It would be far more accurate to say “we have some fruit trees” than “we have an orchard,” but anyway, we have some fruit trees. We sadly lost a beautiful cherry tree last winter in an ice storm, but we have a few apple trees and one pear tree and a plum tree. So charming! Except no. As it it turns out, fruit trees are not charming at all, unless you actually enjoy having the fruit, which I don’t. Our fruit isn’t particularly tasty right off the trees and I haven’t been canning or juicing or whatever-ing with the produce, so basically what we have are several metric tons of rotting fruit all over our yard.

Which wouldn’t be that bad, except for the dog. The dog loves the fruit. The dog will eat an infinite amount of fallen apples. Like, there is no point at which she stops and says to herself, gosh, perhaps I have eaten enough apples for one day. No. She will just walk around gnawing apples forever, CHOMP SLOP CRONCH BLONCH SHLOCK MMMLP, until you drag her back inside.

And that’s how I found myself facing the world’s hugest pile of turds this weekend. It was the apples. The goddamned apples. She’d been eating them all week and we decided to take a family trip to Newport on Saturday and we walked out on a jetty to enjoy the view and she did the thing, you know, the dog thing where they start kind of walking around super fast and their butthole bulges outward and you’re like whew thank goodness I brought a bag and then she humped up in savacrapsanah, the Dog-Shitting Pose, and proceeded to pump out the most enormous amount of feces I have ever seen any creature produce ever. It just kept coming and coming and its GIRTH was unreal and my husband was like “Jesus” and I swear there was a note of pride in his voice and the kids were falling all over the place laughing and ten hours later when she was done I had to try and pick it up with my flimsy little shit-grabbing bag and there was so MUCH of it and I tried to stick it together like Play-Doh but it kept falling apart and there was a family walking towards us so I had to hurry and it was just absolutely indescribable and I could feel the apple pieces through the plastic.

TL;DR: I’m over having fruit trees.

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