Sometimes,
our differences are brought to light only during shared experiences. And, those experiences can help to teach us
that differences don’t indicate that one person is wrong and the other right;
we can simply be different. The good
news is that these little life experiments can really shed some light into the
minds and experiences of others.
Recently, my
spousal equivalent and I decided to spend a couple months in California. We could visit my kids, I could work in some
much-needed meetings with my non-prof clients-to-be, and we could actually see
some sunshine and feel some warmer temperatures. We’d do all of this from the comfort (a
relative term) of the AirStream Ambassador that Ron has owned for a number of
years, but which we have not used since we met each other five years ago. The silver twinkie has been in storage for
quite a while, and Ron had the floor and counters replaced last winter in
anticipation of spending some quality time in RV parks and campgrounds.
We really
should have had a test run, even if in our own driveway.
Based on Ron’s
assurances that we’d have plenty of space and all the comforts necessary for
happy living, I flew down to Sacramento (as I had a commitment there that we necessitated
a quick travel time), and Ron met me down there on a Sunday night with Lucy,
the trailer.
And, it was
there in a trailer park in Loomis, California, that we were made glaringly aware
of a number of things that caused the experiment to fail. We do have high hopes of making some
adjustments (some to the trailer, some to each of our attitudes and expectations)
that will allow us to use Lucy again in the future, but this journey was
definitely not great, and so we came back home to our cold, cloudy, spacious
home. (Spacious is a key word here).
Here are
some differences in our general needs and lifestyles that we became aware of:
One of us is modest, and the other
is, well, not. I don’t like to even
imagine having to walk through a public space (trailer park) in a robe in order
to get a hot shower. Since it happened forty
years ago, I will freely admit that I somehow made it through four years of
high school without ONCE taking a shower in P.E. I also can’t be anything close to
comfortable, to this day, taking showers in communal areas. Not even the local YMCA, where most of the
women there are twenty years older than I am, and gravity has caused all of
their sexually-oriented body parts to be centrally located. Can’t do it.
Ron, on the other hand, is rumored to have come upon a snowmelt stream
once while hiking and, having hurt his knee and needing some of the icy water’s
healing properties, simply stripped naked on the trail in front of a lot of
people and waded into the waters. I have
also witnessed his “dropping trou” outside a backpacking tent at a crowded
campground in order to crawl in and not have to undress in the tiny space
inside. I see this as total insanity,
while he thinks it’s just normal. Since
the trailer, on that first night, had NO window covering up in the tiny bath
area, I couldn’t pee comfortably, even in the dark. Egads.
One of us camped extensively from a
young age, and the other did not. Ron
started going out on horseback for weeks at a time with his grandfather before
he even started kindergarten, to bounty hunt stock-killing critters (cougars,
coyotes, etc) in eastern Nevada. I didn’t
even sleep in a tent until I was in my late twenties, and then it was in tents
in which I could easily stand up, get dressed, etc.
One of us is a human heater, and the
other has Reynaud’s Syndrome. Ron
routinely was throwing off the comforter at night, and my hands and feet just never
seemed to get warm at all.
One of us is seriously organized, and
is thrilled by order. The other is more
disorganized, and lacks the ability to ever throw anything away. Case in point: rather than add our aluminum
cans to our municipal recycling, we save them in huge plastic bags and then
bring them down to California like so many Santa’s bags full of clanging metal,
because the localities up here do not have “paying” recycling plants. The result of keeping a jillion aluminum cans
in bags littering the garage for a year: $48.
I have now announced that I will hand Ron 50 bucks in cash each January
1, and put the f^%$* cans in the recycling each week.
One of us is clumsier than the
other. Having to walk sideways like a
fiddler crab to get past a bed to the bathroom area or a closet (which,
incidentally, will NOT open if the bed is made up; don’t get me started)
resulted in my having multiple bruises on my legs from running into corners of
things, and finally a blue, painful lump an inch HIGH next to my elbow from
ramming my arm into a wall corner.
One of us is much more annoyed by
water being on the floor from an unnamed leak in the roof, while the other just
flops an area rug over it and calls it good.
You get the
drift….
So, we
decided to come home. We also discussed
the fact that compromise is lovely when each person is giving something up, but
if my compromising means being more uncomfortable and his compromising means
being LESS uncomfortable, it’s not really a compromise. And, lastly, we got to laughingly talk about
how we love our house SO MUCH that neither of us is really all that
disappointed to be home.
So, we’ll
fix the leak, make sure all the windows are covered, change the bed formation
just enough that I can get the closets open when it’s out, and I will put
childproof cushioning on all those nasty wall corners that keep wanting to
reach out and hurt me. Then, we’ll try
again. But, next time, we’ll try it out
for two or three days instead of two months, so that we can discover issues and
return home and fix things without having to travel 1500 miles to do it. We have also both agreed that my maximum
survival time in Lucy is probably a week or less.
Live and
learn…now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go take some Advil and put ice on my
elbow. 😊
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