Suburban Goddess

Some time ago, I wrote about the Rockport Hilton, and swore that I would never again commit to a vacation where someone told me there would be a “awesome house that sleeps eleven.” Well, oops, Britney, I did it again.

On a side note, my friend who came in from out of town didn’t get in until 1:00am Friday night (thank you Continental, you SUCK!), so we got a pretty late start to the river on Saturday. A co-worker of mine committed to taking care of my pets, so I patted my beloved dog Bear on the head before leaving him to a quiet weekend with the cats. The car ride over to the Frio was uneventful. HE and I had a lot to catch up on, and the conversation moved quickly and easily without those awkward gaps that you’re always afraid of. It was effortless, comfortable, and strangely exhilarating to connect so easily. But the true test was yet to come.

I had promised HIM that Texas did not suck as much as he thought it did. He had a few negative experiences here, and I was eager to show him that it DOES have many positive things to offer. So of course, when I invited him to the river, his first reaction was, “What do you mean, you just FLOAT?”

“Float. In a tube.”

“Not like a kayak or white water rafting?”

“Um, no. Like a tractor tire with a beer in your hand.”

At this point, I knew this was a test. But he committed, and showed up. So I assured him we would have comfortable accommodations, although probably not much privacy, because it looked that we would have to share a pull-out sofa in the living room of the house. He even agreed to that. So I was really happy when K called to let me know another couple had decided to bail out of their bunkhouse, and asked if we would like to stay there instead.

Total privacy with a hot guy after years of neglect? Screw will power, HELL YEAH I wanted the bunkhouse!

So we were four and a half hours into the trip when my co-worker called and told me she couldn’t get my garage door open to get into my house and let the dog out. After a quick mental calculation, I figured if a=piles of poop and b=time elapsed since the dog had been let out, then c=my new home would smell like crap (literally) by the time I got home. I know I look like the world’s WORST pet owner, but I knew he had enough food to get through a day and a half, so I said SCREW IT! and shut off both my conscience and my sanity. Already, I had to apologize to HIM because we’d have to cut the trip short. But he was easygoing about it. He just wanted to spend time with me.

I was flattered.

So we finally find “the house.” It is a double-wide mobile home, connected to another double-wide mobile home by a plywood shanty porch, complete with a plywood carport. I closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them that I was just halucinating, but when I opened them, DAMN, it was still there. I looked at HIM, who was looking at me with pure amusement now.

“We’re not staying here,” I offered quickly.

“It’s okay,” he laughed. I was quickly falling in love with this guy. About that time, my friend came barrelling out of the double-wide, beer in hand, slurring her words and dropping explatives like a sailor in Signapore. And I had done such a good job of convincing this guy that I was a respectable redneck, and that charade was unraveling quickly. But he took it all in stride, hanging out with all my drunk friends for a few hours before we decided to call it a night. K drove us two miles down the road to our “accommodations,” and at that point, I wished for a fault line to open beneath me and plunge me into the fiery depths of the earth’s rotten core.

Standing before me was a $499 Home Depot special; a shed. With four 2×4 beds, complete with 1 inch matresses sitting on plywood. No pillows. No sheets. Just a single colorful Mexican braided blanket, complete with fringe. Overhead, a single light bulb burned, attracting all of the nighttime flying fuzzy creatures that feed the imagination’s worst nightmares…. There was no sink. No bathroom. A single window unit buzzed noisily, that loud drone that reminds you of summertime at your redneck cousin’s fishing camp….

“Um, K, where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there!” K says, as if I’m one of her problem children. She points into the pitch darkness. I wasn’t quite sure if there was actually a BUILDING over there, or if she was referring to a patch of trees where I would be expected to squat. With a final flourish of her wrist, she waved goodbye, leaving me and HIM there completely alone.

I looked at him. He looked at me. We both burst out laughing.

We spent the bulk of the rest of the evening wrapped in each other’s arms (more out of fear than romance), laughing and talking like two kids at summer camp. Occasionally I would shriek as a moth would perform a fly-by worthy of Maverick, and the two of us would burst into laughter again.

It was not a storybook romance. There was nothing classy about the surroundings. But it couldn’t have been better if we were at the ritziest hotel on the planet. It was real, it was down to earth, and it was just plain FUN. We both come from tiny Southern towns, and we could relate to this; I told him of weekends with my cousins on the river, and he told me of life with his huge family growing up on the lake.

We talked well into the night, until we were both losing the battle to fatigue. As my eyes started to involuntarily close, I snuggled closer and breathed in the clean scent of this amazing person, and fell into the most comfortable sleep I’ve had in months.

This entry was posted on June 13, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.