Note, this post is as you see a month old. I unknowingly had it set to private until 10/4
We’ve had children living with us for twenty one years. Until today. Yesterday we moved Quinn into her dorm at the U of M. Along with 5000 other freshmen. She’s starting an exciting new phase of life and so are we. It’s a strange feeling to wake up and not have any children in the house, with really no prospect of any for a couple of months. And then only temporarily. Kind of scary. Will Becky and I be able to tolerate each other without the mutual project of raising children to hold us together? Will I use the free time in anything close to productive fashion. And will we figure out a way to retire before we’re too old to enjoy it much. Not likely with the loans we’re piling up for college.
In the mean time our aging cat seems to be having aging cat problems. Like forgetting where to pee. My wife is now wrestling a carpet cleaner around the family room trying to get to the point where we could actually invite people over to our house without them turning us in to county public health. That’s correct, I’m sitting here blithely typing away while she cleans the carpet. It’s a well established social convention in this country that any excrement inside the house and outside the plumbing was in the bailiwick of the wife. And so it should be. I did my time shoveling dog shit after the snow melt.
Is any odor more pervasive than cat pee. Or nasal burningly disgusting. Houses that smell like cat pee cross all socioeconomic strata, consider the women in Grey’s Garden, an aunt and a cousin of Jackie O. who let their beautiful seaside house in the Hamptons turn into one of those cat infested garbage houses that pop up everywhere from time to time. I’m sure that when visitors come to your house when it reeks of cat pee, they think that you are teetering on that slippery slope. “I think maybe the Keller’s have gone a little nuts since the girls left. We should be sure to check in on them once in awhile.”
quite the transition. Two years later it still feels like a very big change…
I think you and Becky will be fine, sans children. But I have to admit, when you said she was wrestling the carpet cleaner, my first thought was the man from Stanley Steamers. Now something like that would spice things up.