Retirement community adventures

The paved walkway weaved through and around the retirement community. I strolled idly along it in my husband’s oversized hoodie, feeling lighter with each breath of fresh sea air that washed through me.  The breeze and the sun played a bantering game with my senses, both cooling me and kissing my exposed skin with warmth and light.

Retirees sat in their well-kept houses and watched me warily as I strolled past their back doors.  I admired their perfect lawns and blossoming flowers, but resisted the urge to scoop them up and smell them.  Retiree lawn flowers are not for touching.

After some time the pavement ended and the groomed landscape stopped. I bent beneath some low-hanging branches and stepped onto a muddy, primitive pathway, perhaps once blazed by deer or an early modern explorer, or both.  I imagined the spirit of the deer and the noble trail blazer walking with me, encouraging me to pick all the wild viney flowers I saw and hold them to my nose.  So I did.  Fallen logs, red with rain, replaced well-kept lawns. The music of bumblebees drowned out distant stereos.  

The world of the retirement community was far behind me, or was it far ahead, in the unimaginable 21st century?  And me and my deer ghost and ancient explorer discovered a clearing at the end of our trail where the sun illuminated patches of long grass and scattered raspberry bushes.  I took some berries for myself and left some for the bumblebees, then left my forest glen and explorer friend and deer ghost and stepped back on to the pavement.

The retirees with their coffee and TVs eyed me skeptically again as I walked back past each of their homes, and I smiled at them through their screen doors and popped raspberries in my mouth.  I was giddy with adventure. And I vowed to never grow so used to any place that I don’t see the magic in my own backyard.

Pit stop beauty queens

I was standing outside the port-o-potty at a gas station in Washington.  Another woman stood there too, freshening up while she waited for her friend to come out.  Her red lipstick was fresh, but she still had to have a glance at herself in her small compact mirror before applying some citrus-scented lotion to her hands and looking up at me.

“What cute shoes!” she exclaimed. I looked down at my feet.  One of my socks hung loosely over the side of one of my shoes. The other had awkwardly slipped under my feet.  “Thanks,” I muttered. “I got them at Payless.”  It was an embarrassing thing to say to the woman who was putting her shiny compact mirror back into her Louis Vuitton purse, who couldn’t possibly also be on a road trip at this road-trip only pit stop. I hadn’t anticipated people actually looking at me today. I make it a point to look grungy and sweaty and miserable on long drives like this one.

She looked up at me, then looked back down at my shoes as her friend was emerging from the port-o-potty.  “Phoebe, look at those shoes. Aren’t they cute? And she got them at Payless!”  Phoebe’s lipstick was pink. She nodded in the affirmative, handed me my port-o-potty key, and I escaped into the restroom.

Here I looked into the mirror and learned two things:

1.     I was still wearing the husband’s aviator sunglasses, which make me look uncannily like a man.
2.     There were White Cheddar Popcorn crumbs covering my entire person like chronic dandruff.
3.     There was bird poop on my shirt.  Rather, there was a giant glop of chocolate vanilla ice cream that had dripped upon me two hours earlier without my noticing that looked rather like I had been caught in the unfortunate path of a winged creature with indigestion.

I rinsed my shirt off in the sink and stood awkwardly beneath the hand dryer to make my chest look less soaking wet, grateful the entire time that the only key to this little space was in my possession.  It was only moments, however, before the next perfectly put together woman on a road trip was knocking on the door to see if it was occupied. So I had to hurry things along and walk out with a rather large wet spot on one side of my chest.  I handed the woman my key and hurried away before she commented on my shoes.

My Payless shoes on a non-road trip day.

And that, boys and girls, is why road trips do wonders on a person’s self-esteem. 

Serious road tripping/camping/summering details to COME!