I mean really. We have at least two of them here. I was thinking that one of them came from my beach urchins and the fancy one in the garage was from Dogmomster’s kids. But she doesn’t seem to remember it. Anyway, it is handy to have a small refrigerator on the deck for beer. It saves room in the regular refrigerator and, as npJane just pointed out, if you’ve been on the beach and your feet are sandy, you can grab a beer without rinsing off your feet and head right back down to the beach. I take a liberal approach to who has access to the beer in the deck refrigerator and when. Which is pretty much, anyone anytime. I mean, I don’t want to be buying beer for everyone on the beach but if you are staying in the Old Cabin or over on the other side of us, go for it. I don’t even want you to replace it. Maybe text me if you take the last one just so I know. But we don’t drink a lot of beer so although I want to have some around, I don’t really want to have to schlep it downstate at the end of the season.

A day of leave-taking. I get a little fidgety on the day someone is leaving. Today it was the beach urchins. It isn’t even that I wanted them to stay, although I kind of wished they could. This particular trip, Lizard Breath was a great help with various organizing / flinging operations and I needed help. There is all the legal stuff (and I am working my way slowly through that) and then there is just the flotsam, jetsam, and cosmic debris… … … It is really hard to deal with your parents’ estate while working a full time job. I could use about a month up here but I am not going to get that.

Anyway, I remember when the parents were still alive and I used to come up here with the beach urchins for a few weeks every summer. We always had WAY TOO MUCH STUFF with us!!! And the morning we left, I would be running around like a chicken with its head cut off collecting and packing stuff, followed by The Commander trying to make sure that I didn’t forget this or that random item that she didn’t want to have to trip over for the rest of the summer. I TOTALLY understood about that but it would still drive me nuts because every time she reminded me about one thing I would get so scatter-brained, I would manage to forget something else. The best way for *me* to pack myself, a couple of little kids, and a crapload of cosmic debris is to *focus* on it until it’s done. And *then* ask, “Moom, is there anything you think I’m forgetting?”

I am traveling light these days. Arguably. When you travel to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, you have to schlep clothing for whatever weather you get. I don’t schlep my ski jacket in the summer but I have plenty of warm clothing and often have to wear it. Other than that? Sleeping bag, any cabin laundry I need to return, computer crap (fits in ONE backpack), and maybe a bag or two of grokkeries although we have comprehensive grokkery stores up here these days including one small but decent one three miles down the road.

Today was a bit deja vu except that the shoe was on the other foot. The beach urchins travel pretty light these days too but this time around, they were taking a few things sorted out from The Commander’s cosmic debris home with them. I found myself quietly freaking out just a wee little bit. Will they remember this board or that butterfly or this little box of stuff? Between The Comm’s Other-House-the-Real-House-Where-She-Lives-Some-of-the-Days and the moomincabin, we now own some kitchen utensils in duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate, octuplicate… The beach urchins are certainly not taking all of the excess but they had each identified some things that they wanted. And then there was the bag of garbage that I forced upon them. Heck, Liz, it is double bagged and it’ll be in your trunk and it can go straight from there into my handy dandy Planet Ann Arbor garbage cart. (Thanks, kiddo, love you!)

I tried HARD today not to flutter around and say things like, “Don’t forget this butterfly.” I busied myself with small tasks. Dishes dishes dishes (I am a fanatic dishwasher on any day). Cleaning the shower and toilet. Cleaning out various wastebaskets that seemed to have dead bugs and other icky looking residue in the bottom. Other than making absolutely sure that the one bag of garbage was clearly in the path of the departing 20-somethings, I tried to stay out of the way. It was [I think] okay. It’s a new age these days. There is no one staying here the whole summer, the beach urchins are equal partners in ownership, and we all know that from now on, we are operating under a pack-it-in/pack-it-out philosophy.

My uber-cousin Terri and her beautiful daughter (who is a blasted JUNIOR in high school now, somebody stop hitting the fast forward button) left yesterday. The beach urchins left today. They texted as they passed the Spikehorn Restaurant near Houghton Lake. I am missing those people. We would probably drive each other crazy if we all had to live together all the time, especially in this small, sometimes cluttered space. But I do miss them all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2012 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.