The Rolling Dutch Oven
It’s mid day Monday and another weekend has jumpin’ jack flashed before my very eyes. I didn’t get anything on my To Do list accomplished, and so it goes, I leave behind heaping piles of laundry, empty cupboards and tired, crabby kids. Summer time and the livin’ ain’t so easy Janis! As I sit here at my desk in a 64 degree office tundra wrapped in a jean jacket and winter scarf on this fine July day in Minnesota, I can’t help but let my mind wander to a place where palm trees grow and sand gets stuck between my toes. Sunshine daydreams….
Rocky and I love to joke about packing up the family and moving to California. I mean, who doesn’t want to surf and catch a mean tan while attempting not to get murdered by Jaws? In my mind it has become the final destination to slow down and take a breath. A place to let my hair down (into beachy waves of course) and soak up this wonderful life we’ve been blessed with. It's the somewhere for my free bird spirit trapped inside my anal retentive list structured self to run wild with creativity and expression.
My barefoot blonde soul wants to wake up in a sun drenched little hut by the sea. As a family we will ease into each new day with a glass of lemon water and our kale shakes before doing our yoga out beach front. After centering our positive vibes we’ll check our garden of fresh vegetation before heading to the local farmer’s market for the necessities and to hob nob with the locals. We would keep track of time only by where the sun sat in the sky and travel to our own beat. By this time Rocky would be catching some serious waves and I’d be checking on my little corner clothing shop full of bell bottoms, fringe and other vintage finds. Cherish would be swimming with the dolphins or dancing with Austin Mahone and the boys would be beach babies drinking coconut water and eating plantains while working on their mad longboard skills.
I know, I know… reality bites harder than jaws!! Before I disappear completely into the pages of a Free People catalog that sassy little reality chick comes stomping into my office. With one hand on her hip and the other one shaking my shoulder she protests… but what about school for the kids? Did you know California has a crazy high crime rate? Or how about the cost of living? You’d be lucky to score a teensy little studio apartment for your family of 7? Heeelllooo… have you heard California is in a drought?! Have you even been to California in the past two decades? Do you know anything about it? How big it is? Where in California? You can’t just pop into Target looking the way you do now… What kind of job would you get?
Shhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!! Really Sally? Can’t you see I’m busy here! Must you always keep on with those pesky details!
As much as I love Minnesota and all of its glory… excluding of course, winter traffic, summer road construction, potentially DYING outside in mid January, frostbite, brain eating lake omeba, humidty, allergies year round, Minnesota NOT SO NICE sometimes, and so on and so forth, this is what we know as a family. Locally grown, this is our home. We make mazes out of corn fields. Our house and neighborhood and streets and engulfed with beautiful lush trees. We wait all year for the leaves to start changing so that we can load into the car and hit the apple orchard and watch the trees catch fire. We don’t have to worry about scorpions or rattlesnakes in our front yard and don’t even get me started on the rich arts culture in our own backyard. And the lakes… there are 10,000 of them!
But still, day after day, getting up at the same time, driving the same road, being away from home for more of the day than not, trying to make ends meet, being engulfed in the To Dos. Sometimes those two little wings on my back start to flap. They make me want to swoop up our whole family in a hot air balloon and click my heels three times because there might be no place like home, but how do we know until we soar up in the sky and look down around us? There are so many open roads out there and how do we know where any of them lead if we don’t venture out. It is a tug of war being a grown up sometimes. You are called to order to be responsible and realistic. There is no room to daydream or zoom out to the possibilities around you. We white knuckle what works, even if it isn’t really working because we’re too scared of that unmarked exit called Opportunity Drive. Instead of playing Risk, now we play Life.
We, like the rest of the population, like to play the game “what would we do if we actually won the lottery?!” but we have the discussion as a family. It has become our favorite family daydream. We have a collective plan and the kids love to play along. Of course after curing world hunger and saving mankind we would buy an RV. In my mind it would resemble some sort of VW hippiemobile, preferably in seafoam color and I imagine Rocky’s version would be supped up with a four star hotel inside.
The kids just love the idea of a traveling bathroom and that they can walk around while we drive. We would call it The Rolling Dutch Oven because what else do you call a traveling gypsy circus mobile full of boys! Our travels would most likely mimic the escapades of the Griswold family vacations minus aunt Edna or Christie Brinkely. The debate continues as to our final destination once we pile the family inside and disappear into the sunset but what we all agree on is that we’d be together living and experiencing life one stop at a time.
We may never win the lottery, buy the Rolling Dutch Oven or move to California but we are full of sunshine daydreams. It keeps the day to day alive. It gives us a pin hole of shining light into the sometimes dark and challenging moments in life. As long as there is a dream and a goal there is something to reach for. We hope as the kids grow they will find their own balance of risk and life… and keep playing both!
