The Time I Had a Staredown with a Mouse (while naked)

Tonight I received a much-needed reminder of the virtues of humor. I spent a night out with my ladies--who, by the way, are amazing. I am so thankful for each and every one of them. We went to a comedy show, which was awesome, but I probably laughed just as hard at my friends’ stories throughout the night.

I rarely feel more like myself than when I'm laughing. Equally delightful is when I can make someone else laugh, which is one of my favorite things in the entire world. So tonight, as I laughed and made others laugh, I felt good. I felt like me. It was fantastic.

A few of my friends boosted me up, too, in overtly reminding me that I can be a funny lady sometimes. It felt like a revelation to hear this, as lately I have felt about as far from funny as is humanly possible.

Here’s the best part: These gals encouraged me to be silly. Write down your funny stories, they said. We want to hear about these things on your blog, they said.

I am only too eager to acquiesce, especially if it means I can make someone laugh. Bonus points if it heals me a little in the process.

And so, without further ado, tonight I will retell for you a True Story in the life de Allison—The Time I Had a Staredown with a Mouse (while Naked).

The year was 2007, and the month was October. At the time my husband and I lived in a small, bungalow-type house, and it was old—built in 1921. The one bathroom on the main floor had just a bathtub—a beautiful, deep, clawfoot tub that we’d fallen in love with as young, stupid, first-time pre-kid pseudo-hipster homebuyers—but no shower. The only shower in the home was in the basement—and no, not in a finished bathroom. It was one of those rigged-up standalone stall jobs that sat in a cement-floored room right next to our home’s second toilet. The toilet was extra cool, because it was elevated, situated about a foot off of the ground on its own round cement pedestal-- sitting on it made you feel like you were sitting on a throne. So regal. All of this was open to the rest of the room, which also housed our washer and dryer. The shower, washer, and air conditioner all drained to the same floor drain, right in the middle of that cold, ugly little room. And there were these random square mirrors stuck to the walls, for God knows what reason—I guess so you could see yourself unattractively using all of the various facilities?  The whole setup down there was so, so classy. (Ask my mom. She loved showering down there when she stayed with us. Always a highlight of her visits.)

One of the issues with the downstairs shower situation (among many) was that sometimes you’d forget your towel, and since we didn’t keep the towels in the basement, you’d be shit out of luck. On that brisk late October morning, I walked my still sleep fuzzy self into a steaming shower and sighed with relief—only to summarily realize that I hadn’t grabbed a towel. Damnit.

I was wet but not uber-wet, and so before things got too serious with hair washing and leg shaving and whatnot, I hopped out to run upstairs for a towel. I shook myself off like Golden Retriever does after a dip in the lake—pretty sure I was less graceful than a Golden, but you get my drift. And then I lumbered up the stairs, water still shaking off with each step.

Did I mention that I was eight months pregnant?

My cold, dripping, naked, pregnant, unassuming self schlepped up those stairs, which landed me in our kitchen.

And that’s when I saw it.

And it saw me.

And it saw that I saw it and I saw that it saw that I saw it. 

An effing mouse. Sitting on my stove. Holding a piece of dry macaroni in its stupid little front claws.

We’d had a mouse infestation that year—prior to that day, in late October, we’d already caught four or five. Keeping the mice at bay was always rough in that old house, which we’re guessing had multiple tiny holes and spaces to the outside, created over years of wear and settling. (Also, one time there was a snake in my basement. And no one believed me until years later, we found snakeskins in the storage room. The day we found the skins was one of the most vindicating days of my life. Also one of the grossest.)

So on the day of the naked staredown (mice are always naked, right?) with the mouse, I’d had enough. I was up to here with those little fuckers.

Neither me nor the mouse wanted to make the first move. I was frozen— right foot in the kitchen, left foot still on the second stair, arms suspended in motion, hardly able to blink. Not taking my eyes off of the vermin. The eye contact was intense. We may have seen into each others' souls. 

I’m also not sure who was more freaked out—it or me. Didn’t matter that I’d already seen a ton of those little guys, living and dying and dead—every time I saw one was slightly terrifying.  Which as I sit and re-read sounds pretty lame for a grown-ass woman, and one that could grow an entire child in her womb, but hell, honesty is always a good policy and mice sort of scare me because they’re fast and gross and ew.

I’m not sure how long we stared at each other without moving—could have been two seconds, could have been ten, who knows. Without breaking eye contact with it, I started a slow, sneaky walk into my kitchen, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. In the moment I felt like a panther, gracefully stalking its prey. Yet when I look back on it and think of my awkwardly lumpy pregnant naked body trying to do an elegant prowl, I just laugh. Had to look more like a not-so-sneaky hippopotamus.

Anyway, I’m “sneaky walking” towards my kitchen table, upon which I could see, out of the corner of my eye, sat an empty pot.

But my graceful hippo walk was too much for the mouse-- it dropped its contraband macaroni and ran. And I ran. I scrambled for the pot, grabbed it, and made chase. The mouse flew over the counter, me after it, slamming the pot indiscriminately down. Maybe bashing a few dents into counter, I didn’t know, I didn’t care, I just wanted the mouse.

I didn’t get the mouse. It was too quick, too wily. I blame pregnancy reflexes. And also the fact that I kept slipping on the linoleum, because I was still dripping wet.

After the mouse had disappeared into some unseeable, unreachable corner of my kitchen, I stood there, heart pounding, breathing heavily from anxiety and exertion. I was cold, wet, and I’d just been bested by a rodent. What do you even do after that? 

I sat down the pot, got myself a towel, went back downstairs with my effing towel, took a shower, got ready and went to work. Like my pregnant ass hadn’t just chased a mouse around my kitchen naked. No big deal. It was all very anticlimactic.

But I shit you not: from that point on, every time I came up the stairs after a shower, I was vigilant. The song The Eye of the Tiger was lodged in my head as I made my daily ascent, and I kept my pots, pans, and reflexes at the ready. Being bested by a rodent was a shame that I could never, ever let happen again.

And then a year later, my husband installed a shower in our claw foot tub and my basement-showering days drew to a close. Over the years, my mouse PTSD has ever so slowly died away.

The End. 

What is Love? (Try not to dance like Chris Kattan)

Earlier this week, a client asked me what love is.

I’d never been asked that before.

Three separate images, all set to music, flashed into my head at approximately the same time. That’s how my brain works. Ever seen Scrubs? My head works a lot like JD’s. Let me just show you:

Image 1: I Wanna Know What Love Is (Foreigner). Quintessential butt rock.

Image 2: Moulin Rouge. "Love is...like oxygen! Love's a many splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love." I don't have every word to this soundtrack memorized or anything. 

Image 3: Yeah, the no-brainer. Night at the Roxbury.

If you experienced all of that media as overwhelming....well, imagine living YOUR WHOLE LIFE in the inside of my head. It's a little crazy up in here.

So anyway, back to the story: I’m sitting in my office, all of these images and songs competing for space in my brain. I felt a strong compulsion to start bobbing my head a la Chris Kattan. 

Meanwhile, my client sat there, blinking at me, having just asked me an important question.

I stared wordlessly at her for a lot longer than either of us probably expected, far past what is socially acceptable. (Therapists do a lot of weird socially unacceptable things with silence, I’ll admit it. This one was unintentional on my part, though.)

Pretty sure my face looked like this:

Finally, I opened my mouth, and all I could think to say was, “Damn girl. I don’t know. But let’s work through that question together.”

And so we did. She was able to tell me a few things that love looked like and felt like to her. And I validated her experiences and added a few thoughts here and there. After she left, though, I sat still grappling with the question. What is love?

I’d always thought Duke Ellington said it best when he said, “Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is.” I *ironically* love this statement—the honesty of it, the embracing of the ambiguity of love’s definition. Yet sometimes I crave definition and simplicity, and at these times, the ambiguity unsettles me. How can you know something is there if you can’t define it?

I suppose atheists have been asking the same thing of people of faith for centuries: How can you believe in a god that you can’t see or define or have proof of?

Yet, I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t have a least a little faith in love. Who didn’t share some universal thoughts on what it is, and what it isn’t. People can’t describe it worth crap, yet they know it when they feel it.

So many questions linger within me, though.

Such as—what about when love gets complicated? When is gets all mixed up with one’s history, experiences, and other emotions? A bulk of my caseload is adult clients who have been abused as children, usually by a parent. So often, they grapple with still loving the parent that hurt them, and intense guilt or shame for that love still being there. Love, so celebrated an emotion, tears these folks up.

Which is a decent segue into this question: Can love really go away, all the way away, once it’s been there inside of you? Or does some bit of it remain, always felt, even if just a shadow of what once was, a faded imprint on one’s heart?

And what effect can we even have on our internal experiences of love? Can we make it go away if we want? Can we make it stronger if we want? How much of this operates outside of the sphere of our control?

Oh man, it’d be nice if just one thing in life could be simple. I want this to be simple.

In my desperation, I turned to those who, by default, give me clean answers.“What do you think love is?” I posed to my kids this morning. Their sleep-heavy eyes squinted as they mutually leaned their bed heads back into their cold car seats. “I don’t know,” Evie (8) said. Jonah (7) feigned sleep and said nothing.

At supper I asked again. “Did you have time to think about it? What is love?”

Evie said, “I think love is a heart.”

I can get behind that.

And Jonah shrugged and said, through a full mouth of Mac N Cheese, “Love is love.”

Indeed, son. Love is love.

Though apparently I can’t tell you what love is, or what it isn’t, I can beyond the shadow of a doubt tell you with a certainty that passes even my own understanding—and I never feel certain about much of anything—that I feel love when I look at those kids. I know what love is when I look into their sweet round faces, hold their grubby hands, or get the privilege of hearing their giggles.

I suppose maybe that’s simple enough.

****

How do you experience love? What is it? What ISN'T it? Can it go away once it's there? Share your thoughts in the comments: 

Dear Grieving Person-- I see you

Dear Grieving Person—

I see you.

You’ve lost someone. Or possibly, you’ve lost something dear, something precious. A marriage. A dream. Your health. Your livelihood.  

I see how hard you work to care for others around you. I see you apologizing for your own emotion when you can’t muster a smile, or when you break down in front of others. You draw back, as if you’re afraid to infect them with your sadness. And those around you draw back from you, uncomfortable, also afraid to catch the sadness.

If those around you don’t flee, they aren’t always good company. They’re searching for the “right things” to say, and in so searching, often say the wrong thing. “She’s with the angels now” “God must have needed him more,” and the worst, the ultimate insult to you, the griever, “Everything happens for a reason.” 

It’s all a bunch of bullshit, right?

Grieving is lonely. Grieving can isolate.

For those of you whose grief isn’t obvious—perhaps you are of the variety who have lost a dream or your sense of yourself, rather than a person—or perhaps you’re feeling grief for someone you think that you “shouldn’t” be grieving—your ex, your estranged father, this girl from high school who you used to be friends with but had fallen out with—you are especially lonely. How do you seek support for something you are afraid or ashamed to articulate? How do you reach out for understanding when your feelings defy your own understanding?

I see you.                 

                                                                                              

It pains me to see you, but I see you.

Sometimes I am the steady, compassionate therapist. Sometimes I am your rock and provide the place where you are safe to talk about the range of things that you feel, without judgment, without being shamed for “not moving on fast enough.” I ask about your loss. I ask you to share memories of the person that has gone, or of the dreams that will no longer be. We can do that together and I won’t back away from you.

Sometimes I am the well-intentioned but bumbling friend or family member. When I’m in my office working, the distance that I must maintain as a professional provides me with a shield— translucent, but still useful. When I’m outside of my office, shieldless and unprotected, I feel vulnerable. I feel raw. I get scared. I panic and forget what it is that I can do to be a comfort to you. Even though I know better, I’m afraid of catching your sadness. I flee—maybe not physically, but emotionally.

Sometimes I’m the griever. Sometimes I’m feeling the loss of something or someone in my life so poignantly that I’m not sure I have the capacity to be as open or as present as I’d like to be with you, griever.  Please forgive me.

Often I am all of these things at once.

But still, even in all of that, I see you.

I have hope for you.

I can tell you now that the grief that you’re feeling won’t go away. You won’t “get over” this. No one “gets over” loss.

Here’s what I think does happen:

If you are a vase, the grief is the thing that tosses you to the ground and shatters you into a million tiny shards. You think, How am I ever going to put myself back together? You think, I am never going to be the same, even if I do get the pieces back in order.

And you’re right. You’re never going to be the same.

Day by day, though, those pieces are going to find their way back into place. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and it will happen. Some of those pieces are not going to want to stay in place. Some are going to fall out, over and over again. And yes, even when you think you've got yourself in order, you aren't immune to breaking again. And again. Sometimes when you least expect it, a piece will pop out, or maybe you crumble to the ground entirely, and you will think "Am I ever going to be okay?"

But progress will be made. In time there will be less crumbling, more assembly.

True, the pieces are now going to be joined by glue—you will be solid, and whole, but you’re going to look different. Some of the cracks are going to show. Some of the joints are going to be tenuous. Some pieces might not line up perfectly, their edges too ragged to bond solidly. Maybe some little pieces, the shards that broke off and flew away, too tiny to find, cannot be replaced. Maybe you let those tiny spaces be there. Or maybe you fill them with gold.

When you’re reassembled, you’ll be beautiful. Potentially stronger in the places where you’d shattered.

Even when you’re reassembled, the hurt doesn’t go away. What happens is that your heart makes room for it, and over time, as the pain finds a home where it can rest, it becomes less heavy, less gut-punching. Less likely to mess with your concentration or your ability to get out of bed. In time you’ll be able to notice the pain, breathe through it, and keep moving even as you feel it. It’s a miracle of humankind that we have the capacity to do this.

One day you will smile or laugh and not feel guilty for smiling or laughing. One day you will be able to hold the pain and simultaneously hold within you great joy, great hope, restored wonder.

Someday, someday. These things will happen in time.

For now, griever: just grieve.

I see you.

I am you.

**
Click here to read Part II in the Dear Griever series: I Still See You. 

When you can't have Mom, eat a Symphony bar

Last night will not go down in history as one of my favorite nights. In fact, if I had the ability to remember what happened every day of my life, and further had the ability to rank those days in order from worst to best, I think yesterday might make the bottom quartile.

I haven’t been at the height of my game lately, which is making my ability to cope with life’s doldrums more challenging.

And that’s where the Symphony bar came into play.

You ever had one of these?

If not, seriously guys, you’re missing out.  Go get yourself one. Now.

Let me tell you the story of how I came to be a card-carrying Symphony bar lover: 

When I was young, my mom used to take these grocery shopping trips to York about once a month. Here’s something you need to know about growing up rural: when you go to the nearest “city” (York had a population of around 7,000—practically a metropolis compared to Exeter, my hometown, population ~700), a place that has an actual Bag N Save, you don’t get just a few things. It’s not a “let’s just get some bread and milk” kind of trip. These trips were a “fold down the backseat of the minivan, get the cooler iced up and ready for frozen goods, clear the whole day for this” kind of endeavor. A $250 endeavor, in the mid-90s—that’s a lot of groceries, folks.

These trips, in the early years, would culminate in much begging for McDonald’s perpetrated by me and my brother. Because York had a McDonald’s, yo. All we had in Exeter was two bars and, starting when I was about 12, a Casey’s General Store. By default McDonald’s was the Mecca of food-loving, obese children from Exeter, of which I was one.

In later years, the “cool” factor set in and my brother and I stopped begging for McDonald’s. Mom would let us get ice cream in the food court area of Bag N Save, and we would sit back there in a booth with our food and read magazines while mom shopped.

And in later later years, Nate stopped going on the shopping trips but I thought I should keep going with Mom to help her bag groceries. (I might have also chosen to go because I needed some hair gel or butterfly clips or a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie or some other gratuitous 90s-Teen-Girl product at the York Wal-Mart, but whatever, let’s stick to the “trying to be a helpful kid” narrative). It was in these teen years, the just-me-and-mom-shopping years, when the Symphony Bar thing got started.

You see, they sold these HUGE Symphony Bars at Bag N Save. I bet they weighed a pound. A pound of the most delectable, delicate milk chocolate with perfect, crunchy little toffee bits and almond pieces. Heaven, I tell you. Mom and I were in tacit agreement that there was no ice cream on earth that could possibly taste as good as Symphony after a hard day of shopping. And so, we’d always get one, and eat part of it on the way home. The remainder of it, Mom would squirrel away somewhere in our house, never again to be seen by me— until the next trip to Bag N Save, when we’d start the cycle over.

For me, Symphony bars are synonymous with comfort. Yes, yes—I’ve done a lot of work over the years to move away from using eating as a coping mechanism, so these days it’s usually not my go-to. I’ve really done a fine job of transitioning my stress-coping into activities like crying, venting, and drinking. Oh, and shopping.

I kid. Mostly.

Last night my defenses were weak, and I felt sad, and what I wanted at that moment was my Mom. I wanted her to be right there so I could lay my head on her shoulder and let her wrap her arms around me. I wanted to smell her. I may have wanted to be fourteen, but I’d take any of these things even at thirty-three. I wanted comfort.

And I happened to be in Wal-Mart. And I happened to be buying Dark Chocolate Kisses in for my office (I have a psychological theory about chocolate and keep some around for my clients. Just call me Remus Lupin, y’all). And I happened to walk by the Symphony bars. And because my mom wasn’t right there to tell me that things are going to be okay, and because it was 11:20 at night and I didn’t want to call and wake her up, I happened to purchase the Symphony bar and eat a good long row of it on my drive home from the store.

Not as good as Mom by a longshot, but the taste and the smell of chocolate and toffee reminded me of home and of easier days. It gave me just enough hope to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Thank goodness I’m going home to my parents' house this weekend. I’ll get the real deal, not the proxy.

Maybe I’ll bring Mom what’s left of my Symphony bar. 

***
Tell me, friends: What things do you long for when you're in need of comfort? Leave a comment below; I'd love to hear your stories. 

Take me back to that place I can't go

I learned a new word recently: hiraeth (pronounced: “hear-eth”). Ever heard it? Neither had I. I think it’s pretty old-school, probably one that has fallen by the wayside in modern times.

But it’s such a good word. I think we should bring it back.

What hiraeth means is this: a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, or for a home that never was. It can also refer to the nostalgia, yearning, or even grief that you feel for the lost places of your past.

Whoa. Good one, right?

I found myself feeling some hiraeth, all of the sudden, last Friday while wrapping up a shopping trip at an outdoor mall. It was just past dusk, warm and damp. The air smelled like ice cream and rain. To my left, a college-aged couple walked with their arms around each other, laughing together at something one of them had said. Sixteen years ago, I was in a couple like that. I met my now-husband on a June evening. For a moment I had a strong, almost painful longing for that time when it was just he and I, sharing a private laugh as he headed to the bookstore, swatting away mosquitoes as we walked. Sharing a million little rituals and jokes and wasted time—all of this, I took for granted for the seven years we had together before Evie came along. And in that moment, I wanted it back. I don’t wish my kids away, but sometimes I wish for the ease and comfort of just the two of us.

To my right, a group of four loud teenagers clumsily engaged in conversation together, one of them stepping over another’s words, another making an attempt at a joke that no one seemed to get except for him. Yet then their conversation fell into stride; an easy flow, a spontaneous call-and-response. I remembered what it was like to talk when there was nothing important to talk about. The topics of their conversation were light, mostly meaningless—and to my ear it all sounded like freedom, and like fun. And then more hiraeth, for the times even before my now-husband, the times spent doing absolutely nothing of any consequence with longtime friends. Our windows down and dust flying in our faces, Limp Bizkit or Tim McGraw or possibly even Chicago providing the soundtrack for the night. Hearing the cracking voices and feeling wrapped in the cocoon of humidity and taking in the scent of their cigarette smoke tugged at something right at the center of me.

And then…then. The cigarette smoke. Menthols on a muggy summer breeze. I thought of my Grandma, who smoked for years and years. For me, cigarette smoke on outside air smells like comfort. I longed for my grandma. But not the grandma I could go see now—and let me take a moment to say that yes, she’s with us still and yes, I am absolutely blessed to be 33 and have all my grandparents alive. And I love seeing my grandma now. If I’m being honest, though, who I wanted to see that night was my grandma when I was 5, and she was maybe 50 and so vibrant, her hair as red as smashed bricks and her wit so sharp you might cut yourself on it if you weren’t careful. I could see her sitting on her hard front steps, lit menthol in hand, laughing at me as I tried to walk a straight line on cement strips that lined one of her many gardens. Laughing at me because I was extremely pigeon-toed and walking straight was damn-neared impossible for me. But laughing at me kindly, and encouraging me to keep trying. I remember Grandma this way. Especially when I smell menthols in the summer. And I long for her, that way, and I long for being a child who had nothing on her mind but trying to learn to walk straight.

The irony of it all is that even as I could taste simplicity and freedom on the tip of my tongue, I walked through that damp night to my beige minivan, a symbol of being tethered if I ever saw one. I got in and went to pick up my 8-year old daughter. Seeing her sweet, pool-drenched self made me forget my hiraeth for awhile.

And then Orlando happened, a horrific mass shooting. Innocents died, so many innocents. I looked at their pictures, I read their bios. I imagined what it must have been like to be in the club that night. Or to be a mother or a sister or a daughter of a victim. A client showed me a Snapchat she happened to receive, being a friend of a friend of one of the victims, showing the woman’s last moments in the club and the beginning of the chaos that would go on to take her life. Gunshots. Screaming. I wish I hadn’t seen the Snapchat. I wish my client hadn’t seen it, either.

And then a few days later a toddler drowns at the happiest place on earth due to a freak alligator incident.

Let's not forget about the girl who was recently raped behind a dumpster. Or the fact that somewhere in America, a woman is being raped approximately every two minutes. (That's a real statistic, folks.)

I hear about painful things every day. It’s part of my job to do this, and it’s usually manageable. But at the moment, the pain around me and in me is loud, so loud, and so heavy.

I know what I should do to cope. Stay grounded in the present. Breathe in gratitude for the good things, breathe out the illusion of control of things beyond my scope. Work towards acceptance of the things that hurt and that I can't fix. I know this stuff. I teach this stuff! But sometimes I don't want to do it.

Right now there are two things that I do want: 1) To go far, far away, to a place where no one can reach me and where no news exists, just for a little while. I've already read 22 books this year, all fiction. Now you know why. Otherwise, I'd also take option 2) To go back in time. To not know things, to have never known things. To be five, or maybe fifteen. Maybe even nineteen. I’m embarrassed to admit that I often, very very often, wish I could unlearn things.

Hiraeth. Take me back to that place I can’t go.

Joyful pain: Watching my baby grow up

This evening Jonah fell asleep in the van on our way home from Grandma’s. He’d had a weekend with his cousins, which I imagine was full of trampoline-jumping, Minecraft-playing, late night giggles and mischief. In other words: the kid was exhausted, and thus he was passed out before the sun made its nightly departure.

Even when the van came to a stop in our driveway, which usually wakes him, he didn’t stir. Jeb carried him into the house: still nothing. Jonah’s arms were wrapped around Jeb’s neck, his head lolled on his daddy’s shoulder, and for the first time in a long time he reminded me of his baby self. I said this out loud, and Jeb was thoughtful enough to ask if I wanted to hold Jonah for awhile.

Jeb handed me our boy, limp with sleep and much, much heavier than when we would pass him between us just a few years ago. Jonah snuggled his head into the crook of my arm, and I remembered how he would drowse there, milk-drunk and content, after nursing. Tonight he didn’t lay as comfortably as he had in those infant days. His solid six-year-old body proved difficult to settle into my arms and lap, his legs so long they overflowed onto the couch beside me. How can my child, my baby, be too big for my lap?

Finally, he settled and his breathing deepened. I dipped my neck so that I could lay my head next to his, close enough to breathe in the smell of him. He smelled like vanilla ice cream and outside air and unwashed clothes. Even though I cradled him like a baby, he smelled of little boy. 

It occurred to me that this time could be the last time I’ll ever get to hold him like this. I held him closer. I noticed how the curve of his dark thick eyelashes across his cheeks is the same as it’s always been, though now one cheek has a scar he will carry for the rest of his life. He’s the same as he ever was, yet he’s different today than he was yesterday or last year or five years ago. And, God willing, he’ll keep growing and learning and smiling and laughing and, day by day, year by year, changing, and I will watch all of this with bittersweet eyes.

But at the end of this day and every day, he’s my Jonah. Always my Jonah. 

Tales from the directionally-challenged: How I got lost in my neighborhood. Again.

I do a lot of fairly stupid things. Generally, I’m well-intentioned, so it’s not like I’m trying to be stupid…but intention isn’t worth shit when the outcome of what I’ve done is completely ridiculous. I swear, if ever I write a memoir, all it’s going to be is a compilation of all of the weird-ass situations that I’ve gotten myself into. Like the time I walked into my friend's house-- a house I'd been to many times--without knocking, set my purse down by the door, and then slowly realized I'd walked into the wrong house. (There were strangers sitting in the front room, staring at me…so I said “just kidding,” grabbed my purse and just walked back out the door without further ado. That’s how I handle shit.) Or the time I sucked laundry detergent out of my washing machine with a straw (read about that here). Or the (two) times that I got lost walking around my neighborhood.

Yeah, that’s right.  I got lost in my neighborhood. Twice.

To be fair, we live in a strange little place. It’s a tiny housing development that currently has one large block with a circumference of .5 miles. This neighborhood has been carved out of the middle of the Nebraska countryside, bounded on three sides by farmland and pastures. 

So we live in this weird (yet awesome. Don’t underestimate the awesome factor; I really love it out here) little enclave, and I like to go on walks. Especially in the Fall, when the combination of crisp air and golden sun is so incredibly alluring—so much so that I’d go as far as calling it delicious. If Fall could be bottled, I would drink it every day. I imagine it’d be tasty.  (And no, Fall DOES NOT taste like a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. You are unoriginal.)

Anyway, where I was going with this was: walking the same half-mile block over and over can get boring, and also, people get tired of looking at you. So every now and again I get a little wanderlust and strive off of the pavement and into new territory.

There are paths where new houses are going up, and some of these paths connect us to another nearby housing development—so we often use this method to get from our development to the other. It involves walking through some brush and over some pounded dirt paths, and in some places, hopping a short barbed-wire fence. It’s really not bad. (Yeah, if you’re reading this and thinking that I’m trespassing at some point on these journeys, you’re probably right. Shame on me for trying to be fit and adventurous.) Those who are less directionally-challenged than me have no problems on these off-the-beat walks. I’ve been on walks with my neighbors, so I know it is possible to stray off of our block, see some things, and get back to our block, no problemo. One of my neighbor’s dogs is even able to accomplish this.

The problem (for me, anyway) is that one of the roads back from the nearby development ends abruptly, cut off by barricades and, if that wasn't enough of a deterrent, a soybean field. Yup, the road literally ends in a beanfield. Welcome to Nebraska, y’all.

Small roadblock between me and home. 

The first time I encountered this field, I was pretty sure that the route home was through it. So I navigated through the beanfield, and when I came out the other side of it, there were two roads—one going left, and one going right. I chose to go right. Long story short, by the time I consulted my phone to figure out where the hell I was, I was several miles away from home. I had to call my (non-impressed, directional superstar, born with an effing compass in his brain) husband to come pick me up. “Why didn’t you look at the sun?” he said. As if that works.

The road I ended up on. It's pretty, right? I mean, at least there was good scenery. And mile markers.

My neighbors really do pity me, and so after I told them about how I got lost, they took me out to try to help me find the error of my ways. Under their tutelage I realized that my beanfield jaunt had been the CORRECT directional choice, but I should have turned left after I got through the field.

So you can imagine my excitement yesterday when I encountered the same beanfield.

This one! I know this place!

(For the remainder of those post, I’m going to give you the insides of my head in boldface blue italics, like this, because it is through seeing what happens up in there that you can start to appreciate how truly frightening my decision-making can be. [Side note: Is anyone else stoked that I have a super-serious big girl job in which other people PAY ME to help them figure things out, including decision-making? If you’re not jazzed about this, you should be.])

Oh yes, this field! I know what to do here. Walk through the field, turn LEFT, and I’m home free.

But then I noticed that the field, while dry, was still unharvested. This means that there were grasshoppers everywhere, and I hate grasshoppers. I wasn’t in the mood for dealing with their crunchy, sassy little asses. As I surveyed the field, I noticed that there was a large swath around its perimeter that had been cut down.

Oh, someone has cleared a path for the construction guys, so they can drive their equipment through this field. If I walk on it in this direction, I will hit a road that I know, and I know this because I see a big cement silo that I’ve walked by before. Yup, that’s the ticket!

So I started down the cut-down path. I had some indie station playing in my earbuds and was walking in time to a song. I turned a bend and this allowed me to see further up the path—and what I saw was movement. One…no, two…figures.  

Must be someone from the neighborhood walking their dog. Which means I’m on the right track.

More walking. More fiddling with my phone, in an attempt to find a non-sucky song. I was getting closer to the person and his/her dog on the trail.

Wait, that dog is really huge. Like, really, really huge. Is that a mastiff? No one in the neighborhood has a mastiff. Or a great dane.  Hmm, this doesn’t make sense, this is weird, maybe if I just squint hard enough I’ll be able to see…Oh Good Lord, that’s a DEER. And that person walking the dog is ANOTHER DEER.

You don't realize how big deer are until you're really close to them. 

Do male deer ever charge at people? Who’s more scared, me or them? Do they feel safety in numbers?

I’ve had staredowns with animals before, but none who were bigger than a breadbasket (if you really insist on knowing, previous staredowns have mostly with cats and dogs and once with a mouse while I was pregnant, and coincidentally, naked. Which is another GREAT story).  Thus, I found this intense eye contact to be mildly unsettling. The deer stopped moving and went still, probably having a similarly shocking experience to what I was having (“Oh, there’s something big coming, probably another deer like us, maybe we can hang out, eat some soybeans and stuff…oh wait, no, it’s making way too much noise and the hair is all wrong, that’s an EFFING HUMAN and THEY KILLED BAMBI’S MOM so RUN.”) 

They ran. I didn’t get my camera out in time to document this, but man do I wish I would have. They were probably 100 meters away from me when they bolted. And the reason I know this distance is because I remember running 100 meter dashes in junior high track. Which when I ran it looked less like a dash and more like a medium-paced trudge, because I’m slow and because starting blocks confuse the shit out of me. But, it was the shortest distance race that we ran so it was my favorite. Because less is better when it comes to running.

Which is, weirdly, a great segue into what happened next.

The deer-staredown incident behind me, I continued down the path. The indie song playing involved a woman singing a plea for someone not to leave her, and I was thinking about how this is yet another pathetic cog in the anti-feminist wheel of destruction that is our modern music industry. If I hadn’t been listening to music and thinking so hard, I might have seen (or heard) the next thing coming.

Which was a combine.

For you city folk reading this, a combine is a very large piece of farm machinery, used to harvest both corn, and in this case, soybeans. It’s like a ginormous tractor with a rotating head (when it’s cutting beans at least. The corn head is spiky and doesn’t rotate at all. But I digress). Here’s what they look like:

With a beanhead, doin' work. 

Would you want to see this coming at you? I don't think so.

I’m a pseudo-farm kid. Meaning that my dad was a farmer but we lived “In town,” and by “in town” I mean in a village of 700 people and in a house that was two blocks away from a cornfield on three sides. In any case, I’m farm kid enough to be appropriately scared of being on foot in the same field as a combine. I’ve seen what a bean head can do to a deer, and it ain’t pretty. (Note: The staredown deer from this story did not, to my knowledge, die by beanhead. The poor mangled deer I’m referencing was something I saw another time, because remember, my dad is a farmer and encounters all kinds of gruesome shit. Which you might not expect, depending on how much you know about farming, but which is absolutely true.)

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. Is this seriously the last song I’m going to hear before I die? THIS?

And at this point I was running. I mean, as soon as I saw the combine, it was off to the races. (Which you know from above treatises could not possibly have been THAT fast, but rather, as fast as a slow girl can go.) Now, granted, the above set of thoughts about my impending death was admittedly a bit histrionic, as the combine was pretty far in the distance and I wasn’t even sure it was coming towards me at that moment. Didn’t matter, though—I’m pretty sure that a moving combine moves faster than me, and so if there was ANY chance it was headed my way, I wanted out.

Ooohh…so that “path that was cleared for construction” was a swath of harvested field IN A FIELD BEING CURRENTLY HARVESTED, you dumbass.

My feet found pavement relatively quickly. I was safe. The only thing left at stake was my pride, which I could have totally preserved if I wouldn’t have decided to go ahead and post this whole debacle on the interwebs. Who needs dignity when you can completely (and intentionally) embarrass yourself in front of all of your friends, and probably even some people you don’t know? Pride is totally overrated.

You might be pleased to know that once I doubled back the way that I came, I easily found my way home—which is a step up from the first time I got lost. Also, I wasn't even gone that long:  the whole 3.75 mile round-trip ordeal only took about an hour. SO THERE.

And that, my friends, is the story of the second time I got lost in my neighborhood. Look for it in my upcoming debut memoir, Good at school, bad at life: How having a PhD did not save me from myself.