When we go to the lake, my job is simple but important.  After the watercraft is lowered into the murky but joyful Oklahoma shallows, I am responsible for driving the truck and trailer up and out of the water and then parking it over in a nearby parking lot.  Then I just have to descend the concrete ramps to the dock, where Handsome is waiting dutifully for me to join him. 

   Sounds simple, eh?

   Never mind how fraught with danger the drive itself might be, what with the pivoting trailer axle and all; what vexes me is the quarter-mile walk after parking.

   I walk plenty o’ miles every day on the farm, but not really FAST.  If I was a race car, I could cover that quarter mile in like eight to ten seconds.  And I might be driven by Vin Diesel.  But that is totally different…



   But I am NOT a ten-second car living life a quarter mile at a time.  I am just a girl.  Just a girl in flip flops.  Just a girl in flip flops and a bulky life jacket battling the elements.  Trying to walk not only slowly but also toe-to-heel in order to reduce jiggle. 

   Supposedly this works, giving the illusion of walking on properly girlish high heels.  But the truth is that doing so greatly diminishes your pedestrian dexterity.  What you might gain in “firmness” you definitely lose in grace.

   And an already mossy concrete ramp is a terrible place to be not graceful.  I promise you that being caught in this situation while in lake attire is humbling. 

   So the short walk from truck to dock turns into a desperate evaluation of my fitness plan.  And suddenly, between dodging those concerned glances from other boat loading Okies, I am thinking a lot less about zooming over the choppy water with Handsome and more about how to improve my situation before our next lake jaunt.   Pitiful.  Waste of sunshine.

   Happily, the water racing is so dang much fun that the Longest Walk is quickly forgotten.  Within minutes I am aboard, screaming and guffawing while we chase other people’s wakes and make plenty of our own.  I have at least a few days to make the next Longest Walk a little shorter.

The End.

   Multitasking is a bizarre challenge for me sometimes.  My easily distracted mind (already filled with imaginary things) cannot always afford to be spread thinly among more than two topics at once.  Handsome is way different.  He is like a high performance engine that can only run well at extremely high RPMs.  By comparison at least, I am much more like a bicycle.  Or a unicycle that can barely keep its balance.

   So all of you fantastic people who can successfully operate eight or nine projects at once are, well, I am sorry, but you are annoying.  No offense.

   That said, when it comes to housekeeping I do find that a quick five or six -point morning routine is effective.  Let’s be super cool and call it “All Systems Go.”  That makes me feel more like an astronaut, which is AWESOME.



   Pretty much, just identify the major operating systems in your home and layer them in a way that gets it all done efficiently.  Then step back as autopilot and watch it all come together.  Or fall apart, depending on your particular stream of luck that day.

   Around here the systems are:

   Obviously there are details not mentioned here, but these are the different systems.  These are the general types of jobs that can be layered and set in motion, not necessarily tended to minute by minute.  And when I manage to get them all on “Go” early in the morning, the day just seems to unfurl itself so nicely.  And I am more free to swim in imagination. 

   Oh shoot, I forgot “Facebook.”  Let’s include that too.

   One of the indispensable luxuries we afford ourselves in life is pretty regular time in the hot tub.  At our old house in the City we had one but tended to slip in at night, under cover of darkness, happy not to be seen and also not to be seeing much.  Now, the view is so pretty and our habits are so different that we prefer to soak early in the morning.  Sometimes so early the sun finds us already warm and relaxed at her ascent.

   We crawl out of bed, groaning but hopefully smiling, trading kisses with tightly sealed (unbrushed) mouths.  I flip down the sheets and toss away the bed pillows, letting the bed rest and air out before it gets made again later in the morning. 

   Our short walk down the upstairs west side hallway offers a view of the pond.  Or puddle, depending on the severity of drought conditions at the time.  This is great way to gauge the morning’s weather.  Choppy water means wind; glassy water means a calm day.  The presence of egrets or blue herons means, well, just that the birds are hungry and the fish are at the surface, I suppose.  This is all extremely cryptic and requires a trained eye to interpret.

   Once in a while we see a deer sipping at the edge of the water, but this happens more often in the evenings.

   Assuming our still sleepy legs carry us safely down the stairs, we greet Pacino together.  Then Handsome heads outside to open up the hot tub while I pour, sweeten, and make perfectly creamy two mugs of coffee.  Drinking a hot, filling beverage while soaking in an equally hot body of water is sublime.  It liquefies your bones.

   The walk from the kitchen door to the hot tub is about thirty-eight paces.  And if the chickens have been released by now, it is a journey fraught with ankle pecking and hungry clucks and flutters.  Sometimes I drizzle a little coffee over chunks of bread for them, but usually I focus on reaching my handsome guy, knowing the chickens can get my attention the rest of the day.

   We immerse ourselves in not only hot, bromine-scented froth but also affection and loose thinking.  This is weird time of day for someone like me who dreams heavily.  That gray, blurry time that must be spent diving phantoms from reality, night from day.  Working on this mental task while watching the sun spread herself over the fence line is wonderful. 

   Handsome sits across from me, gradually waking up himself.  He doesn’t dream and so doesn’t need this sifting time, but he does think.  He thinks as hard as he works, which is too hard. 

   Steam tendrils rise and fall with the breeze, dragonflies zoom past, and roosters crow at horses.  The buffalo issues a few of his deep, rib-rattling snorts.  We look around the farm and can see every paddock, almost every animal from this vantage.  We take an informal roll call and start discussing the day before us. 

   Five days out of seven Handsome is soon off to the office, of course, and sometimes he feels like telling me what he’s facing there; other times we focus more on the farm and all the many lists here, both short term and long term.  He asks me, “What’s on your plate today, Sally?”  Sally is not my name, so I regard this as permission to answer in any wacky fashion I see fit.  “Painting elephants” is a fave response.  But since I am still in that gray dreamy time, the feasibility of finding elephants that need a good touch up cannot help but present itself to my Brainstorm Help Desk.  The idea always gets shot down.

   The comfortable looseness we enjoy at this summit of sorts allows us to touch on a dozen or more topics in a relatively short stay.  We are still deeply connected to each other as in bed, eliminating the need for much of the perfunctory conversation that litters the rest of life.  We can hit the headlines in our hearts and extract from each other genuine reactions and unedited, undiluted meanings.  Funny that it takes water to be undiluted.

   We tend to stay longer than we can afford to, eventually finding it more difficult to drag each other out of the water than it is to drag ourselves out of bed.  But once we’re towelled off the day has begun!  Our thoughts are crystallized, and our bodies are up to the tasks we have chosen.  I love the gift of starting my day with this man, with our ritual, with love. 

   The summit serves us well.