Mission: Aborted

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.  😊