Stay-cation Chronicles 2019

At 5:00 on a Friday afternoon in August, I fled the office with the next full work week plus the following Monday scheduled as vacation time. Including the weekends, that’s 10 consecutive days of doing whatever I want. Some colleagues and I kicked it off at a restaurant/bar near work for appetizers and drinks. The place features a decent fancy cocktail and craft beer menu, consistently good food, and a portrait hung in a bathroom stall of a woman who reminds me of Olympia Dukakis watching and judging the toileting business. I half expect to hear commentary that I’m wiping wrong, but I promise, that is the only weird thing about this place.

After the drinks and snacks it was time for this year’s winner of the vacation destination lottery – “The Bungalowell” in the occasionally beautiful, frequently annoying and traffic-congested neighborhood of Pawtucketville in Lowell, MA. It’s also my everyday home and not anywhere I would go on purpose if I didn’t happen to live there. It’s not my favorite neighborhood or even my favorite house on the street. It’s a place to keep my stuff and eat and sleep, and after paying all the bills, the taxes, and the flood insurance, plus other life expenses, there is very little left with which to eat or sleep elsewhere. This is a direct consequence of desperately needing a place for myself and two dogs to live, and shopping for a house in a time of low inventory, low mortgage rates, and rising prices. What I pay is still less than renting, so I have no idea how other single people manage. Most of my money and energy for the past three years and likely the next 27 years or until I die are sunk into the place, so this particular week the place will double as a vacation home.

The Bungalowell is nothing like the Jamaican resort that was the site of my last proper vacation in 2017. No waiters. No buffets. No housekeeping team. I am the waiter, the cook, the maid, the gardener, and the caretaker of two dogs. The fur-beasts are a key reason for forced stay-cations, thanks to the ongoing wallet-emptying expenses of daily medication, doggy diapers, and vet care, never mind the added expense of dog boarding to allow leaving the house for several days at a time. Life with the fur babies happens in eight-hour increments. In my imagination I am carefree and wealthy but real life clearly has other plans for me.

Before the scheduled time out a list of activity options was drafted that included the beach, hiking, antique shops with my Mom, dance class, yoga class, make a tomato pie, paint the bulkhead and maybe also the house foundation. Also, make a stained glass piece to go over the storm door on the enclosed porch, do some photography, write, read. They were deliberately called “options” so I could pick and choose or easily opt out without guilt. Because I know myself.

Last year, I stay-cationed at the same hovel and spent one entire day and night painting the kitchen which had been stripped of wallpaper a full year earlier. The next couple days were spent hobbled by the leg tightness earned climbing up and down the stepstool 10,000 times during the taping and painting activities. There was a fun visit from my Mom plus some other forgotten activities, meaning they were neither outstanding nor horrible. It was just a week that was.

The first Saturday of stay-cation 2019 had a successful morning visit to my gym’s yoga class. The rest of the day’s loose plan was to shower and dress in something fun and summery to go to the monthly open house at Western Ave Studios, a massive mill complex of artist studios. I showered, realized I don’t own anything “fun and summery,” and pulled on some androgynous camo patterned capris and a tee shirt. Then, I sat on the couch to think great thoughts. There’s no room for more art in my house filled with windows and doorways and little wall space, so the strongest reason to go to Western Ave was to maybe flirt with a tall, handsome painter who lives and works in one of the studios. The several previous times I’ve gone there with that intent, he’s been already deep in conversation with someone the whole time I’m browsing the studio. After looking at every single one of the paintings at least twice and signing up for his newsletter yet again, it would feel stalkerish and I’d panic and flee. So, I didn’t go. I didn’t do anything but sit and think and half-watch TV/Netflix/Prime Video and look at Facebook, making it just like any other Saturday except that I went to the grocery store, which I usually do on Sunday.

Sunday was a successful vacation day spent with a friend at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts for the last day of the “Toulouse Lautrec and the Stars of Paris” show. This was not on the original options list and would never have happened without her. For starters, shame on me, I didn’t even know about this show. When she mentioned on Friday over drinks that she was going on Sunday, I enthusiastically and opportunistically invited myself along. The weather was perfect, as in, not too hot, not too humid, partly cloudy and breezy, and we did a healthy amount of walking between the museum, a lunch spot, and the parking garage. The show was interesting and cool and moderately annoying thanks to a few people who insisted on standing three inches away from every piece of art to take a cell phone picture of it. Cripes, if remembering all the artwork is that important to you, buy the  professionally photographed exhibit catalogue sold in the gift shop you’re forced to walk through when exiting the gallery.

Monday and Tuesday were quiet. There was some writing and playing of online Scrabble with total strangers while the dogs softly snored on the couch. Monday featured a magnificent salad followed by undoing all the healthy benefits by finishing off the ice cream and potato chips bought on Saturday. The free weekly outdoor yoga class not attended all summer was forgotten about until it was already over. Tuesday’s highlights included procrastinating until it was too late to attend a morning dance class, and making and eating kale chips and kale soup before cancelling the healthy deed with a cheap grocery store brand chocolate bar and corn chips with cheese sauce and salsa. I mowed the lawn and sweated like I was in a sauna, which is the closest I've been to a sauna since childhood when my family had a membership at the YMCA. Grown up vacation drinks from a selection of wine, beer, soju, and hard liquor were considered both days, but the service in this place really sucks and every time I wanted a beverage I found myself holding a habitual glass of ice water.

Wednesday began with the amusement park rush of a pajama-clad slide down the back stairs on my butt while letting Winston out to do his potty business. No idea how this happened. A bonus jammed right hand and wrist were included. The morning was spent sitting on an ice pack, and after the pain of peeling and cutting vegetables for salad, the afternoon was spent resting, icing, and elevating the Ace-bandage wrapped wrist. Luckily, there are only three steps or it might have been worse.

Finally, on Thursday there were actual plans outside The Bungalowell with my mom, sister and nieces for lunch and a visit to a new consignment shop. Mom gave me a card with a picture of a young girl dancing on a beach and said it reminded her of me on our trips to the beach every summer. That made me sad, because I don’t remember being that happy frolicking girl and have no idea where she is hiding or even when she disappeared but I really wish she would come back. I think I would like her. Before heading back home we attended the wake for a dear friend’s dear mother who passed away earlier in the week.

On Friday, with the remaining vacation days dwindling, the theme for the week and my life in general was apparent. There’s a line in a song by They Might Be Giants that says, “Now it’s over, I’m dead, and I still haven’t done anything that I want. Or, I’m still alive and there’s nothing I want to do,” which pretty much sums it up. This stay-cation, like most of my time outside work, has been spent doing a whole lot of nothing, which feels like either the pinnacle of solitude and luxury or a shameful waste of time and life. Time and perspective will tell.