But it's not enough for a garage sale

I am probably the Mrs. Kravitz (of the original Bewitched TV sitcom fame) of the Kal Haven Outpost campground.

Our home is parked next to the main entrance of the campground so I often sit in the “living room” and watch the comings and goings of fellow campers.

Last night a huge fifth-wheel trailer pulled in. I watched as first the truck appeared in my view and then the trailer, and the trailer and the trailer. Today, I can lean back and look out the window and watch as they continue to set up their camp.  The trailer was a “toy hauler” and this morning they backed a gator/golf cart thing out of the back end. The ramp then becomes a sort of outdoor seating area. They also set up a free-standing canopy. It’s a nice setup.

Before the pandemic shut things down last winter, King, our daughter and I took an afternoon and looked at new travel trailers. I have to confess we didn’t bother looking at the bigger models or the fifth wheels. It wasn’t so much the price tags as it was the length. Neither one of us has a desire to pull (and park) anything longer than 20 feet. That pretty much puts us in what manufacturers label as the “Weekender” category.  Evidently they don’t think one can live full-time in small spaces.  It takes some compromise,  but it is doable.

We are enjoying our life in our “weekender” and we continue to work to make our tiny house a home.

Last week King and I traveled to Grand Haven to help our son finish painting and putting up trim on his house. Well, King helped. I played with the grandkids. It gave us the opportunity to go through the nine remaining boxes of stuff we have stored in our son’s tool shed. I came home with a 1945 edition of the Joy of Cooking (which was a wedding gift to my mother), a few prints my mother had in her home, the Bible that was given to me when I joined Haven Reformed Church as a teen, and a couple of trivets.  

There are still a few boxes remaining that contain small appliances. They are doing little more than gathering dirt and mold. I thought I might save their content for the day we need to move into an apartment.  Now I am not so sure. I’m doing well with the set of cheap pots and pans, a single knife and plastic mixing bowls I use daily in the trailer.

So, I started eliminating even more “stuff” and gave a juicer and the picnic basked it had been stored in to our daughter-in-law.  I have a food dehydrator that I will give to the first daughter or daughter-in-law who says she wants it. I have bread pans and a few other things that can go to Goodwill.

Those treasures we decided to keep we brought home and spent a day or two looking for places to display them.  We live in 160 square feet. There is not a lot of wall space.

Our eclectic home has now become even more so. It’s become the Brady Bunch 1970s kitchen meets a 1980s rust and orange dining room meets my mother’s Early American décor.  The trailer now has a few sentimental things that will only mean something to me. The Early American prints were a gift from me to Mom when said she wanted something for above their bed.  There are two trivets in the kitchen. One was a gift to Mom when the church’s Women’s Guild group had a Secret Santa gift exchange in 1965. (There is a date and name on it). The other trivet I bought for her in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) when I was an exchange student to Finland in 1973. There is also a glass vase my Finnish family gave my mother that same summer.  The cookbook is tucked away with a homemade Glenn United Methodist Church cookbook that has a few recipes from Mom in it.

Seven sentimental items and a sewing machine – that’s not so hard for kids to get rid of when King and I are gone, right?

Although it’s not much of a garage sale, is it.

We truly are worlds apart

It’s Sunday morning and the campground is a beehive of activity. People are sitting around their campfires for one last cup of coffee, joggers are getting one last run in before packing up and leaving and those wanting to get an early start are starting to unhook their trailers and RV’s or take down their tents.  By this afternoon there will be about eight of us left in the campground for the week. Summers are busy, but by the time we leave for the winter we will be the only trailer here.

I’ve been watching the young people across the drive from us. A group of eight friends (I assume they are friends) in their mid-to-late 20s spent the weekend camping. They have been a quiet group, spending most of the time sitting around the campfire, playing football and generally just chilling. There are two dogs with them – a golden retriever and a black lab. The lab must be older as he’s pretty sedate and goes with the flow. The Golden… is much younger and is quite insistent that everyone must love him for obvious reasons. They are well-behaved dogs. I got barked at when I came around the corner of our trailer with a huge hanging flower basket in my arms. It scared the poor lab to death to see a walking flower basket. He barked. Once.

Cindy could care less that there are other dogs around. She spends her days either sleeping in our bed or sleeping in the shade of the side of the trailer that faces the road. There is soft dirt there and she digs it up slightly for the coolness of the dirt under the surface.  I’m not certain she even notices the people across the drive, or if she can see that far. She definitely can’t hear them.  She is at the stage in her life where naps are frequent. She stretches out and almost immediately starts snoring.  Sometimes standing directly over her and calling her name is not enough to wake her and I have to physically touch her. I think it scares me as much as it does her.  Even my sweet Cindy could wake up snapping if startled. She never has… but the possibility is always there. I’m always cognoscente of that fact. I practice touch and jump back.

King and I normally park our home in more remote locations and often find our nearest neighbor to be a quarter-mile or further away.  This campground is very nice, clean and modern. But it reminds me of our early marriage years when we lived in married student housing. That’s ok. A bit of nostalgia is good for the soul. In our early days together I was the more gregarious one. I spent a lot of time outside with the other mothers watching our children and talking about classes. King only ventured out when there was a pickup basketball game.

I’m not so gregarious anymore. I prefer isolation. I could say it’s the pandemic, but I honestly think things would be the same with or without social distancing.  People wear me out.

Something happened this week that has me scratching my head and saying to myself, “Really, Phyllis?”

We got satellite TV.

For the first time in 43 years I can honestly say I am really excited about having almost unlimited TV channels. I think it is a further excuse to stay away from people.  A complete satellite system was among the things given to us by our friend two weeks ago.  It only took our son (a former cable installer) and 50 calls to the service to get it working. I guess I REALLY missed cable news shows. I didn’t realize it until I spent that first morning with satellite binge watching news shows. And yes… they are news SHOWS. Please people. Learn the difference between news reporting and opinion giving. That said, I do enjoy watching them.  Except for one news network, but since I neither endorse nor pan anything in my blog, that show shall remain nameless.

But I don’t watch news 24/7. And King likes his sitcom re-runs (before we got satellite I bought him the first five seasons of Andy Griffith on DVD and he now has the shows memorized). 

The other night, however, I fell asleep while reading and woke to King swearing at the TV. I listened for a while and realized he was swearing at a news show host.  “He’s just giving his opinion. He’s entitled,” I told him.

“Not when his opinion is wrong.”

“Ok then. I have a nice teen paranormal romance here. Why don’t you take a break and learn about werewolves and Dijons?”

We are worlds apart.

 

I get new marching orders

I arrived in Michigan from our winter in California with an ankle that sometimes ballooned to three times its normal size. Friends and family were convinced I was going to die. I was pretty sure whatever was wrong happened because I repeatedly whacked my foot on the side of our daughter’s bed while I was taking care of her after surgery. She often insisted, quite loudly, that I move a little faster while helping her in and out of bed.

After several ex-rays and doctor visits I finally relented and made an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon to see if he could figure out what was going on. Turns out I have an extra bone in my ankle (it’s congenital) that was, in fact, injured by whacking it repeatedly on the side of the bed. There is actually a name for the extra bone. It’s called os trigonum.

The surgeon suggested I start physical therapy. Three summers ago I went to physical therapy when I had knee replacement. So it’s not new to me. It’s cool. It gives me something to do.  And I’d like to be able to keep up with our 13-year-old dog, Cindy, when we go for walks.

I have the same therapist I had three years ago. My first day of therapy was his first day back to work since the COVID shutdown. I would like to say here, I wear a mask,   I work out on a bike for several minutes of “warm up” and I have yet to die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Wrong again conspiracy theorists.  

So part of my therapy is to improve my balance while standing on one foot. I can’t do it and I’m pretty sure it’s not an injury thing. I simply don’t have any balance.  I used to. I could do that yoga pose thing where you put your left foot against your right knee and stand for hours.  Now I just tip over.  The therapist is always ready to grab me in case I don’t right myself in time.  I finally told him I would give him an A for effort but if I actually did tip over to just let me go. One person down is better than two.

Honestly, I used to be quite limber. I could do hand springs, cartwheels, forward and backward walk-overs and even a passable splits. It is quite surprising when you discover these feats are no longer possible.

Years ago, when the children were young, we were visiting my parents. The grass was soft and cushy and I decided to try a backward walk-over. I think I landed first on my neck and then on back with my feet stuck underneath me. And I could not move. I finally managed to roll across the driveway to a lawn chair and pull myself up. I walked into the house to find my father lying on the floor in fits of laughter.

He finally pulled himself together long enough to gasp out, “I was coming to help you but I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Anyway, that was the last time I tried anything acrobatic.

 

 

The give and take of marriage

It was a fairly quiet weekend for King and I. We helped our son paint his house Friday and babysat Friday night while he and his wife went out for dinner.

That left the rest of the weekend with little to do.

Saturday I attended a virtual wedding vow renewal for a friend I worked with years ago at Central Michigan University. Five months ago it was going to be an in-person vow renewal. Many things have changed since then. There is this thing called a pandemic. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It has forced a lot of people to make big changes in their lives. And because of those changes we are learning a lot about friends, family and acquaintances that may have been better left un-learned.

Anyway, Brian, (the former co-worker from CMU) was “the IT guy” for the department where I worked.  I can’t recall the number of times I would call him, “Brian I need a new keyboard.” Brian knew I spilled -- yet again -- another Diet Coke all over the keyboard. He never let on that he knew.  He would simply show up in my cubicle with a new keyboard and offer to plug it in for me.

There are some people (not many) I miss from that job. Brian is one of them. I’ve never met his wife Sara, but she and I chat frequently via Facebook. I wish them both all the best.

As for King and I…

Two weeks ago we drove to Chicago to get some RV equipment from a friend who is moving out of the country. The friend had just purchased a new high-tech motor home with all the bells and whistles. Since he is now moving and selling the motor home he gave us all the extra equipment he had purchased to go along with it.  It was a generous offer made because we had been good friends and loyal employees. After retirement King and I had worked as caretakers on his hobby farm in South Haven.  We were the last in a long line of people who came before us.  Taking care of his place was actually a pleasure and we stayed on there for seven years. Apparently it was somewhat of a record for most of the caretakers there.

We came back from our quick Chicago trip with two brand new deep cycle batteries, some type of holding tank pump, a made-for-RVs satellite dish and a few “other things.”

Among those “other things” was a foam mattress topper. I decided to cover it and use it as an extra cushion for the table-that-converts-to-a-bed in the trailer. I use the area as a reading nook – only setting the table up when I have a project that requires the use of my sewing machine.  I had ordered some material online and when it arrived I hauled the topper out onto the picnic table to attach the material to the topper – quilt style.

During the middle of the operation the wind picked up and the topper blew over onto itself. As I’m lying across the topper to keep it from blowing away I said to King, “I need a little help here.”  He promptly got up and went into the trailer.

Okay then. I’m resourceful. Guess I’ll do this one myself.  I pulled an ice chest over to the picnic table with my free foot and hauled it onto the end of the topper that was flying around. A second later King came out of the trailer and handed me my phone.

“What’s this for?”

“You said you needed a calculator.”

Marriage takes a lot of patience… and hearing aids.

We settle into a routine

We are still here. I guess that means we are here (at this campground) for the duration.

It’s interesting to see the campers come and go. Big and fancy motor homes, equally big and fancy travel trailers line the campsites on the weekends. King and I watch them as they pull in, expand their “homes” with slide-outs and bring out the coolers, lawn chairs, outdoor grills and awnings. We are not quite that fancy but we are comfortable.  In the trees are the primitive sites and tent campers find respite from the heat in the shade.  Those of us in the sun either bake or turn on the air conditioning.

By Monday afternoons the campground is generally empty. But oh, the activity over the weekend. The owners have started hosting a farm market on the grounds from 3 to 7 p.m. on Saturday. The vendors sell baked goods, craft items, BBQ and more. It's rather nice to be able to walk over and browse.  I'd invite anyone in the South Haven area over the weekend to check it out. Wear your mask. Practice social distancing. 

Saturday  a couple pulled in next to us. They had just come from an RV sales place in Grand Rapids and are doing a trial by fire with their new trailer for the next two weeks. It’s a nice trailer and it was fun to watch as they set it up and discovered all the bells and whistles it has to offer. There are a lot of them.

Bells and whistles on our trailer? Ummm. No.  As I said we are not that fancy. The old Shasta we owned before this one had a roof air conditioner. This one does not.  Last week, with temperatures predicted to soar into the 90s, our youngest son decided he did not want to come for a visit and find baked Mom and Dad inside the trailer. So he bought a portable air conditioner. It’s the kind that sits on the floor with a large hose vent for the exhaust. After considerable debate King relented and let me block off the back screen door with foam core board (the kind that’s used for school projects) and vent it out the hole for the door handle.  We never use that door anyway. He thought we should set it up in the shower and vent it out the top trailer vent.  We tried it. The bathroom was freezing. The rest of the trailer – not so much.  We now have it set up in the back. 

Prior to installation the inside trailer temperature reached 100 degrees. It truly does help keep us from baking.

Days have kind of melded into one another. King gets up, putters around the outside of the trailer (Sometimes he starts a fire – sometimes it’s on the hottest of days), takes our dog, Cindy, for a walk and then we sit outside in companionable silence. For us 40-some years of togetherness basically means we’ve said all there is to say to one another.  Since I am the family communication person, he’ll ask, “Hear from anyone?” And I will give him the Cliff Notes version of a conversation with whatever child I’ve chatted with via messenger or text.  Later in the morning he’ll get up from his lawn chair and go into the trailer. I know it’s a sign he is getting ready to head to the store, but I’ll wait until he says, “Are you ready?” because if I get up and get my stuff together he’ll sit back down and wait until going to the store is, once again, his idea. Rather than have us ready to go to the store at the same time, he would rather wait in the truck drumming the steering wheel with his fingers while I get my purse, find the keys and lock the trailer. It’s his way. 

Our trips to town include a drive through the parking lot at the North Beach in South Haven. I call it “checking to see if there is still water in Lake Michigan.”  Then we head to the gas station where he buys scratch-off lottery tickets, lemonade, beef jerky for Cindy and an ice tea for me. It’s the same every day. Tuesday evenings are reserved for golf league. It’s the reason we stay in one place for the summer. Well, it’s the Tuesday evening golf league and twice a month golf scrambles that keep us here. And yes, he practices social distancing.

Sunday morning was one of those golf scramble days. So I sat alone and watched a few neighboring campers pack up and get ready to head home for the week. I would be lying if I said I envied them.  I’m quite content where I am.

Life may sound mundane,  but it’s peaceful.

It's all in the genes

Those who knew our Mother knew her as a classy, wise, Christian woman. What few people knew was Mom was incredibly deaf. A childhood fever left her with 20 percent hearing in one ear and completely deaf in the other.  Growing up Mom was somehow able to hide it from her family because she learned to read lips. It wasn’t until she had to take a physical to work at the Willow Run airport during World War II and the nurse said to her, “You are deaf, aren’t you?”  that Mom realized maybe it did not go completely unnoticed.

Mom’s lack of hearing did not entirely escape my older sisters and I either. As we were growing up we learned that if you didn’t turn your back to mumble a disparaging remark directed toward her she knew exactly what you were saying.  But few, if any, of her friends knew just how deaf Mom was.  (Her hearing aids she got when I was a young teen did help). 

It still came as a surprise to me when her friends from church were incredulous when I told them how deaf Mom was.

A couple of years ago while having coffee with the “church ladies” from the Reformed church our family attended when we lived in Hamilton, the subject of Mom’s deafness came up. “Your Mom was such a great woman. And when you talked to her she always paid such close attention to what you were saying,” one of the ladies said to me.  Yup.  Because Mom was reading your lips. Oh, she could probably hear what you were saying, the lip reading re-enforced she was getting it accurately.

Mom had a fun-loving streak in her too. And she wasn’t always reverent. I recall a Sunday evening church service in the middle of summer, probably in the late 1960s. It was hot. The hot, sticky, humid summer that is pretty normal for Michigan. That evening she decided it was too hot for nylons and opted for a summer dress and sandals.

This was the late 1960s. In Hamilton. In Church. Women did not yet own pant suits. Or jeans. I think of Mom’s four sisters she was the only one who had shed a dress for Bermuda shorts during the week. But there was Mom, bare-legged and comfortable in church on a Sunday evening. Sacrilege.

As was the custom, clusters of people gathered after the service outside the church before heading to their cars.  Mom caught three old biddies talking about her. (She read their lips). They were aghast that she had shunned nylon stockings for bare legs and (gasp) was wearing sandals.  Mom was quite steamed.

As we left the parking lot that evening Mom hung her leg out the car window and yelled, “I painted my toenails too.” It was the first time (and unfortunately not the last) that I realized not all “Christians” were non-judgmental of others. I applaud my mother for letting them know what jerks they were.

Genetically speaking we inherit genes from both our parents. The classy, wise genes passed me by. The “screw you” hang your leg out the window gene, however was doubled. From my father, I inherited the “see injustice and seethe in anger” gene. Couple that with the hang your leg out the window gene and you’ve got one pissed-off older woman who speaks her mind.

For years I was able to keep the combination under control.  And that is partially because as a journalist it seemed prudent to keep my opinions to myself lest I be accused of being biased.  A true journalist will still do that. But people can’t seem to understand the difference between news and editorial and everyone gets lumped into one big “fake news” pie.

But I’m retired now and I don’t have to be politically correct. So for all those who want to talk about my absence of nylons, my sandals and my political views – I paint my toenails too.  

Read between the lines.

A quiet existance

There is something to be said for sitting out on a picnic table, a cup of coffee by my side while I write this blog. 

King has a fire going and is sitting next to it with his latest batch of scratch-off lottery tickets in his hands.  It is his daily ritual – start a fire, walk the dog, work his scratch-off tickets. Even on the warmest of days he stokes the fire in the fire pit first thing in the morning. No one knows why. He likes the crossword puzzles lottery tickets and usually wins enough to turn around and buy more.  He sits by the fire, a quarter in his hand and takes his time scratching the little boxes. When it gets too warm to sit in the sun/by the fire he moves to the shade of our canopy. By mid-morning will venture into town to drive past the lighthouse and trade in tickets for new ones. (Wearing masks, of course).

Kal Haven Outpost (where we are staying for the summer) is a new campground. The young owners opened it in 2016. They work hard to keep the place clean and nice. While the RV campsites offer no shade, there are young trees planted at each site. Primitive sites are set in the woods. King and I do a lot of boondocking (primitive camping) in the winter months but since we are stationary for the summer, having amenities is nice. The owners are planning on adding sewer hookups to each site either this year or next and are hoping it might draw more seasonal campers. It’s a hefty financial undertaking for them and I would imagine this season is rather a-typical and probably just a little scary. I think by next month there will be three or four of use using the campground as a seasonal camp.

This morning the campground is a beehive of activity.  Children are racing around on scooters or bikes and people are walking their dogs. King and I keep to ourselves. We are that old, grumpy-looking couple people tend to avoid. King has years of practice at looking grumpy. As an assistant principal he dealt with school discipline. Remember when our mothers told us that if we continued to frown our faces were going to freeze that way? Our mothers were right. King has a perpetual stern look about him. Our children and I are the only ones who don’t take him seriously.

Earlier today a crop duster circled over the campground several times. We assume he is dusting the blueberry fields on the next road over, but since he dips below the tree line it’s difficult to pinpoint his exact location. To the east of us is the Gingerman Raceway. I can hear the racers as they make their way around the track. I never got into the sport, but I did, on occasion double-date with high school friends and sweethearts and go to the drag races in Martin. In my mind I can still here the radio ads for it on WLS radio out of Chicago.

The campground is not full, although the cabins in the back have been rented for the weekend. I think there are nine RVs and trailers here and quite a few tents, although it’s difficult to tell the number of tents because they are set back in the woods. The place was packed for Memorial Weekend, so I’ll be interested to see how full it gets for the Fourth. I’m guessing now that state parks are open it might not be quite so busy.  King and I drove through the Van Buren State Park this week. It is packed. Uncomfortably so. I understand the draw – Lake Michigan is just over the dune but with 10 to 15 feet of beach (and in some places even less) available I’d just as soon not venture out amongst people. I’ve always preferred to stay away from crowds, but it seems now it’s rather prudent to do so. Rather nice. I can be anti-social with an excuse.

It’s a quite existence. Last week our big excitement was the wind taking down our canopy.  We didn’t see rain in the forecast (and we didn’t get any), but the winds tend to whip through here like the prairies in Kansas.

King had played 27 holes of golf during the day and crashed early. I fell asleep reading a teen paranormal romance (I’m addicted) only to be awakened by the sound of the canopy assailing the side of the trailer. King was out. I woke him up and his response was, “We’ll take care of it in the morning.” Not acceptable. I went out into the wind and got the cover taken down (at least now there was no longer a sail attached to the flimsy metal structure). A group of 20-something young men stood in the doorway of the bathhouse watching me struggle but didn’t offer to help. I think they were afraid of me to be honest. I was pretty perturbed with King.  I gave up trying to fold-up the frame and lashed it to the picnic table for the night. We were able to salvage it and have it set up again, this time we watch the weather and take it down if storms are predicted.

That’s our lives in a nutshell. Pretty tame by most standards. Pretty comfortable for us.