Crossing my fingers for a boring weekend

I’m hoping for a boring weekend.

I need a weekend with no community events, no harvest fairs, no costume parties, no parades, no sporting events, no dinner parties, no concerts, no soirees, and no storm preparedness to do.

I need a plain dull weekend at home. I need to fold laundry, three basketsful. I want to do some cooking and baking. I should vacuum and dust and mop. There are light bulbs to change, plants to water, Halloween decorations to put away. The kids’ rooms are a mess. (Yes, that should be their responsibility. No, it’s not going to get done unless I’m standing in the room waving my arms like a semaphore.)

All of the things that can start to seem so tedious if you do them too many weekends in a row are starting to seem like something to be coveted, now that it’s been so long since I’ve taken the time for those tasks. The idea of vacuuming the house top to bottom actually appeals to me, and not only because I have a fabulous new vacuum cleaner. Just because I haven’t had enough time to devote to my house lately.

It’s been a busy fall, the way fall always is; my workload was heavier the past couple of months than I anticipated, and a few unexpected responsibilities popped up as well. Such as, for example, preparing for this week’s storm, which ate up several hours last weekend.

So this weekend I’m not going to invite anyone to do anything. I’m not going to suggest any cultural excursions to my family. I’m not even going to implore anyone to go for a walk with me. (Okay, that’s a little bit inaccurate; my friend Jane and I already have plans for a Sunday walk. But I promise I’ll try to keep it to just an hour.)

A day away from the weekend, it still all seems like a novelty, all those mundane cleaning and cooking and housekeeping chores that I’ve neglected these past few months. A few hours into Saturday, I’ll probably remember exactly why I’ve let myself get so easily distracted by community events, parties and cultural excursions instead lately – because they are all a lot more fun than vacuuming.

But not this weekend, or so I keep telling myself. My house needs attention, and for the time being, I feel like lavishing it on. Setting the clocks back means I’ll even have an extra hour to do it.

It might be months before this kind of mood strikes again. It’s a rare thing to get a craving for housework, and I don’t expect it to happen soon again. But as long as it lasts, I plan to work it.

 

Staying up late

I took a late-night trip to the airport to pick up my parents last Saturday. Their flight arrived a few minutes after ten o’clock. By the time I’d dropped them off at their house and gotten home myself, it was past eleven. But when I walked in from the garage, Tim was still in the playroom, playing a computer game.

“Go to bed, Tim,” I said automatically. “It’s really late.”

“I will. Soon,” he told me.

But as I headed upstairs to bed, I realized something unexpected: it didn’t really matter to me if he went to bed soon, because I had a sudden flash of memory of what it was like to be fourteen and staying up late on a Saturday night.

Quite simply, sometimes it was the best part of the week. At fourteen, in eighth grade, you’re still too young to drive anywhere or go out with your friends, but your body is developing a teen’s affinity for staying up late and sleeping late in the morning. On weekdays, you just have to fight it: force yourself out of bed when the alarm goes off, turn off the light at night when your parents tell you to in order to get a decent amount of sleep before school the next day.

But on weekends, you can give free rein to your naturally changing biorhythms. And when I saw Tim still playing computer games at 11 p.m., it reminded me how good that used to feel. I remembered the weighty hush of a house in which everyone else is sleeping. The sense of getting away with something because you’re still awake doing what you want to do. The privacy and solitude that are not necessarily easy to come by when you’re a middle schooler busy with friends, classes, team sports, and family activities.

Sometimes, I confess, I’m still tempted to find that late-night solitude, to stay up really late and wend my way through the wee hours reading or working on a project or watching a movie or writing, the way I used to do at Tim’s age. But, like eating candy every day, it’s one of those things you assume when you’re a kid that you’ll do as soon as no one can tell you not to, and then by the time you could do it without facing any sanctions, you have too many compelling reasons not to want to do it anymore. The house gets cold late at night, and it’s so much harder to think clearly after midnight. Predominantly, of course, is the reality that it’s just so hard to get up in the morning if you’ve stayed up really late. And sleeping late in the morning is unthinkable, with so many plans and duties and responsibilities.

So even though the words came out automatically that night – “Go to bed, Tim; it’s late” – I never followed up to confirm that he did. I just went to bed myself. And part of me hoped he didn’t go to bed for a while yet. For a few moments there, I was living vicariously, remembering the freedom of being a young teen with no weekend bedtime. And it felt good to remember.

To Do....or not To Do

I woke up yesterday morning already facing defeat with my To Do list.

I just knew I wouldn’t get through it. I never get through it. And if there was ever a weekend when my odds were good of navigating my entire To Do list, this weekend was it. We had almost nothing on the calendar other than bringing Tim to a school dance on Friday evening and picking him up afterwards, a children’s theater event on Saturday afternoon, and church on Sunday morning. So if you start the clock at 5 p.m. on Friday – the time that I consider the work week over and the time that both kids are home from their afternoon activities – and run it until 10 p.m. on Sunday – the time I try to get to bed – and then subtract eight hours each on Friday night and Saturday night for sleeping, that leaves about 37 hours to fill however we chose.

But by Sunday morning, I knew I wouldn’t get through my list, and as I lay in bed thinking about getting up, I found myself unwittingly cataloging those items most likely to get bumped. I knew I’d get through the basics: running, church, cooking meals, washing dishes, probably a load or two of laundry. But I knew I wouldn’t get to any of the lower-priority tasks, like putting away the props from the play that ended its run two weeks ago, cleaning up Holly’s room (which in terms of the frustration it causes me should be top-priority, but because of the amount of work it constitutes always gets bumped down a notch), and searching through the boxes that we still haven’t unpacked since moving here last spring for the nighttable lamps that I really wish we could start using again.

So I got out of bed and focused on the beginning-of-day items I wanted to get through: writing in my journal, eating breakfast, putting bacon in the oven for when the kids woke up (they sleep late on weekends, which is truly one of the many joys of reaching the tween years). But even as I drove to church, I was still thinking about all that I wanted to get done but probably wouldn’t find time for.

And then at some point I had a change of heart. What if I just catalogued those things that did get done, instead of those that didn’t? What if instead of rebuking myself for never getting those last few boxes unpacked, even eleven months after our move, I celebrated the fact that I was out for a four-mile run before church? What if making the bed mattered more than not getting the laundry done?

Just thinking this way put a more positive spin on the day. And when I got home from church, the sun was shining and the temperature had already reached the low sixties. Holly wanted to go for a bike ride, Tim wanted to play badminton, and my friends Jane and Donna were coming by for a walk at 2:00.

So I mentally threw away the To Do list and just enjoyed the sunshine. Truth be told, by the time dinnertime rolled around, I’d accomplished even less than I expected. I hadn’t even made it to the supermarket, having rationalized that if we had milk, orange juice, and lunch-makings for Monday, it could wait another 24 hours.

And yet I’d gone running, biking, walking and played badminton, as well as collaborated with Tim to set up a ladder and pluck three errant badminton shuttlecocks out of the roof gutter. It was a late-winter day that felt like summer, and I’d spent more than half of it outside. Yes, the laundry went unwashed, the groceries unpurchased, and the nighttable lamps left in their storage boxes for yet another week.

But I’d stopped thinking about it. For the rest of the day, I counted what I did do rather than what I didn’t. And that made me feel as if I’d accomplished plenty.

Pre-holiday getaway

When we first broached the idea with friends about going away this weekend, I acknowledged that in some ways it seemed like not the best timing. “I know every weekend in December is really busy with parties, plus there’s always Christmas shopping or baking or decorating to do….” I said tentatively. “But do you think it might work out to go away the second weekend in December anyway?”

And in some ways, as the date approached, it continued to seem like a silly idea. After we’d agreed it could be fun to be in Portland instead of home this past weekend, party invitations started arriving via snail mail and email, and I realized we’d miss out on some key social events. I looked at my Christmas preparations list and saw how much still needed to be done – not just the inevitable gift-shopping but also the card-writing and candy-making and Christmas tree-purchasing. I wondered why we didn’t pick a wide-open weekend sometime amidst the tedium of late January instead.

But there was still a sneaking suspicion that this could be a great weekend to go away. And it was. Holiday spirit abounded in Portland, and the city glowed with glittery ornamentation in a way that our quiet suburban town just can’t match. We toured a Victorian mansion decorated for a Civil War-era Christmas; we shopped at bustling downtown stores as part of a Downtown Holiday Stroll, and we viewed an exhibit of gingerbread houses.

Then, inspired by all the clever gingerbread architecture we’d seen, the four kids in our group made their own gingerbread houses. After dinner, we strolled to the Old Port to see the colorful lights on the outsides of buildings downtown as well as the pretty wreaths and somewhat more discreet ornamentation on our neighbors’ doors.

Rather than pulling us away from the holiday spirit, going away actually seemed to add to it. But it wasn’t only because of all the festivities. If I had stayed home for the weekend, I would have done a lot of cooking and some housecleaning and a little bit of shopping. Instead, we did a lot of walking throughout the city, ate some wonderful food, learned a little bit of history at the Victorian mansion, and had a great visit with our guests. Since we didn’t have a lot on the schedule, the kids could take all the time they wanted decorating their gingerbread houses, and when they were done, there was still nowhere else we had to be, so they went outside to toss a football around.

I’ve often wished our holiday season involved a little bit more time for nature and reflection and a little bit less time going to parties and addressing Christmas cards. Yet I wouldn’t want to do without the parties and cards and other holiday minutiae altogether. They’re part of the season also. But being out of town gave me the opportunity to focus on some of the aspects of the season that I tend to neglect: time outdoors, quality time with friends.

On Friday night after dark, I stood out on the balcony looking at the full moon over Casco Bay, with the masts of sailboats lined with holiday lights twinkling from the harbor below. It was a new perspective on the holiday season. And just like the rest of the weekend, it made stepping out of our usual holiday-season routine for a couple of days seem like a wonderful idea.

Busy Sunday

At 7:56 last night, I sat down and glanced at the clock.

7:56. I was sitting down for just a moment, but at that moment I felt like it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to avoid getting up again all evening.

But then Holly called from the shower that she needed a towel, and the dog looked like a trip outside for her might not be a bad idea, and I remembered that the clothes needed to be moved from washing machine to dryer.

It was a busy day. I arose early to write my usual one thousand words of Morning Pages. I decoded the problem I was having syncing my Google calendar with my new phone. And though the peace and quiet of the household with everyone else still asleep was blissful, I headed out for a four-mile run.

“Tell me one thing: why do we have to exercise?” a man who looked to be in his sixties and was out for a walk near the state park called out to me as I approached him.

“Funny you should ask; we were talking about that just this weekend,” I told him, which was true. “It’s because we don’t do manual labor! If we were out working in the fields all day, we wouldn’t go running!”

I finished my run and made waffles for the kids’ breakfast. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and took a shower and headed to my friend Jane’s house. She and another friend and I did a 45-minute walk in the warm midday sunlight and talked about how odd it was to have a sixty-degree November day just two weeks after an October snowstorm.

I drove back home and put in a load of laundry and swept the floors. I welcomed a new friend of Holly’s who came over to play. I figured out what to make for the next several dinners and made up a grocery list. Then it was time to go grocery shopping.

Home from the supermarket, I tried to unload groceries, talk on the phone to my mother, and make dinner all at the same time. It took a while, but I succeeded, more or less. I made meatloaf and baked potatoes stuffed with a steamed broccoli mixture, and it was one of those rare evenings when everyone not only sat down together (that’s not the rare part) but ate what was offered.

It wasn’t an unusually strenuous day. As I told the man who was out for a walk while I was running, it’s not like we were working in the fields. Or performing surgery. Or piloting a steamship or keeping a spaceship in orbit. It was just regular weekend life.

And it’s wonderful. I love all of these things: running by myself, walks with friends, cooking, taking care of the house, being with my family.

Still, I felt decadent submitting to inertia at 7:56 while Holly took a shower. But I couldn’t help it. The days are full. Still, every aspect of it had meant something to me. Fellowship. Parenthood. Nourishment. Physical well-being.

Days like this seem mundane sometimes. They aren’t the ones we remember, the way we remember vacation days or parties, say. They are just….days full of weekend-day type things.

But I wouldn’t have taken away a single part of it. Even if by 7:56 I was ready to give up on all mobility for the rest of the evening.

Yes, I was worn out, although I managed to rally enough to do what else needed to be done before bed: tucking in Holly, letting the dog out again, locking the front door. Despite not having been toiling at any kind of manual labor, I went to sleep with that invaluable sense of having done a good day’s work. Even if I have no material harvest to show for it.

One wonderful weekend

What a great holiday weekend. It was one of those rare times when everything I was looking forward to met or exceeded my expectations. It was a joyful three days, from beginning to end.

The plan that was hatched back in April, which involved meeting my sister Sarah and her family as they flew into Boston and then taking her two kids home with me for an overnight while the adults enjoyed her college reunion in Providence, and then meeting up with them the following morning to hand off their kids as they drove northwest to my brother-in-law’s reunion in Amherst (note to any single people reading this: unless you marry someone who attended the same college you did, be sure to choose someone with a different graduation year, so you don’t get stuck every five years trying to make it to two different reunions at the same time), worked exactly as I hoped it would. The meet-up at the airport went flawlessly, and the four cousins – my two children and Sarah’s two – had a wonderful time playing together from 4:00 on Friday afternoon until nearly 11:00 the following morning. My parents joined us for Friday night dinner, and even the menu worked out just as I’d hoped: mountains of pasta, with a piquant anchovy-tomato sauce for the adults as well as the gastronomically adventuresome Tim and regular marinara sauce or butter for the younger three. Then we met up with Sarah and John for lunch and I got to hear a little bit about the first of the two reunions – and tell them a little bit about the sleepover, including showing them a video clip of the originally choreographed Taylor Swift musical revue performed on Holly’s bed – before we parted ways.

After that, the four of us headed into Boston for our 24-hour excursion: again, we were charmed. The Bostix booth had half-price tickets for the evening showing of Blue Man Group, and Legal Sea Foods still has lobster on the children’s menu. We exited the parking garage with seven minutes to spare on our 24-hour ticket price. Charmed indeed. Even the dog enjoyed herself, doing an overnight with my parents. (Mom bought her a rawhide bone from Whole Foods. I never shop for the dog at Whole Foods. That’s what grandparents are for, I suppose.)

On Monday I attended the town Memorial Day observances at the cemetery and then visited for a while with a friend. The weather was hot and sunny; predicted thunderstorms never materialized. I made a bowl of salsa, with plum tomatoes and garlic and jalapenos and lime juice and avocado and fresh cilantro, and ate most of it myself. (A little self-indulgent, true, but no one else in my family likes my homemade salsa.) Tim played an early evening baseball game and returned home pleased with his pitching.

It was a great weekend. Spending an hour at a Memorial Day observance isn’t quite enough to feel like I paid enough tribute to the meaning of the holiday, but nonetheless, I savored every minute of it. The whole weekend went exactly as I’d hoped, and I can’t ask for anything more than that.

Wonderful weekend

We had a wonderful weekend.

We hiked in the woods, exploring the paths around our new home and eventually finding our way through the forest to the Great Brook Farm State Park ice cream stand. (As Rick says, what are the odds that our two sequential addresses in Carlisle would both be within walking distance to Carlisle’s two ice cream stands, respectively?) We hosted our new neighbors for drinks and appetizers (and both couples brought blossoming plants as gifts, so the house remains filled with floral fragrance even as last week’s beautiful bouquet is dying off). I went to church and had no responsibilities once I arrived: just sat and enjoyed the Palm Sunday/Passover/pre-Easter/Holy Week sermon. We pulled our bikes out of winter storage, dusted and oiled them, pumped up the tires, and the kids and I did a little ride down the street and back. I ran a total of 9.1 miles: 5.1 on Saturday and 4.0 Sunday. We loafed in the hot tub. We visited with my parents and checked out the new calf, now christened Alice. I even filled our birdfeeders.

Exercise, nature, church, friends, family. It really doesn’t get any better than that, does it?

It wasn’t quite as decadent as I’m making it sound. I did some housework, too. I cleaned all four bathrooms (how our mission to downsize ended up in one additional full bathroom for me to clean is still not quite clear to me) and vacuumed the rugs.

But it felt good to be doing housework. For months, all my household time has been consumed in issues related to moving. First there were months of preparing for open houses and showings. Then we packed, and cleaned some more. Then we arrived here and spent two weeks unpacking. During most of that time, I neglected ordinary housekeeping routines because there was so much else to do.

As of Friday, the last box within our living space has been unpacked and disposed of. There are still untouched boxes in the garage and basement – items we either don’t need right away, like holiday decorations and winter sports equipment, or items we don’t really need at all but will never get rid of, like all of my old journals and my grandmother’s wedding dress – but there are no more cardboard cartons cluttering up our bedroom or kitchen or living room. Emptying the last one out was like seeing the last snow bank melt in the spring: gone, finally, gone.

So much of everything we have done in recent months has been consumed by the enormity of moving. Specific circumstances aside, this is true for any move. It’s just so much work.

And for that reason as well as others, I was so grateful for the joyful normalcy of this past weekend. Grateful to be cleaning sinks and tubs instead of filling boxes. Grateful to be out walking on a forest trail with all four of us and the dog together.

Much remains still undone, both in terms of housework and personal work, but I went to bed last night with a sense of completion and, yet again, gratitude. Normalcy is so often the best reward, bringing both joy and relief. Both emotions filled me as the weekend came to a close.

Every weekend, "Things to Accomplish" does battle with "Things Accomplished"

From the perspective of pitting Things Accomplished against Things I Intended to Accomplish, weekends often seem like a small recurrent allegory for the challenges of life as a whole. On the larger scale, both categories are regularly on my mind – the Things I Intend to Accomplish being along the lines of writing another book, reading the works of the Transcendentalists and taking up strength training, while the Things Accomplished list includes giving birth and developing a writing career.

But on the much, much smaller scale, each weekend has its own lists, and my hope is always simply that by Sunday night I’ll be able to believe that there’s some general sense of balance between the two.

But there never really is. Almost by its very nature, the Things to Accomplish list always outweighs the Things Accomplished, and this weekend was no different. I made several desserts late Friday afternoon and then completed the rest of my preparations for a Farewell Party I was hosting that evening for a friend who is soon moving out of town. Naturally, I overestimated quantities; we have far too many desserts left over, but the baking, the party planning and the party itself can be moved over to my Things Accomplished list, so that’s satisfying. On Saturday I did what felt to me like a lot of housework but doesn’t appear to be much at all when I compare it to all I wanted to get done. Sure, I cleaned up the kitchen from Friday night’s get-together and I ran one load of laundry and folded another, but I didn’t remove the tiny light bulbs that need to be replaced in the oven and microwave as I’d hoped to. I didn’t go through all the boxes stashed in the darkest corner of the attic that are crying out to be sorted. I ran my daily mile, but I didn’t get to those yoga DVDs.

On Sunday I accomplished planning a Sunday school class – it’s my turn to teach Holly’s age group for the next few weeks – and I took the car to the car wash, but that too was nothing compared to what I hoped to get to, which ran more along the lines of reading the New York Times, going snowshoeing, helping Holly to clean out her toy box.

Still, as the weekend ends, I remind myself of the valuable and important moments that end up on neither list. I spent a really convivial four hours with old friends on Friday night. I visited with 50 or so Carlisle acquaintances at a Super Bowl party on Sunday. I took care of children, animals and spouse: all moments whose long-lasting value should not be overlooked, even if they are not as practical as folding laundry.

It’s unclear to me where the fine line is between self-acceptance and complacency. I’m not sure if I should feel good about the party I hosted and happy I had the chance to catch up with still more friends Sunday evening or whether I should focus on all I didn’t do. True, we didn’t fit in any family yoga time this weekend, but I played cards with Holly and helped Tim with some homework; is that good enough?

In the end, both conclusions are probably valid: it’s good to take satisfaction in what you accomplished, and it’s also good to keep striving to improve. I’ll try again for yoga and Thoreau next weekend. For now, I’m still feeling happy about all the time I spent with family and friends over the past couple of days. Surely the oven light bulbs can wait a few more days to be replaced.

Perfect weekend

At the end of the day on Sunday, I realized why we’d had such a great weekend…it was because every member of my family had the opportunity to do things that they love to do.

My husband Rick brought Tim and a couple of Tim’s friends to Canobie Lake Park in celebration of Tim’s twelfth birthday. They rode roller coasters. They drank Coke and ate hamburgers with French fries. They got drenched in a water ride. They let themselves become dizzy in the hall of mirrors. It was a dream day for him. (Oh, and Tim had plenty of fun as well. Just joking.)

Meanwhile, I brought Holly and a friend of hers to the science museum. Not the world-famous one in Boston; the small-scale version in a neighboring town, which to Holly’s eternal delight includes a hands-on art studio within their definition of “science.” It’s a small enough place – three floors in a rehabbed Victorian house – and Holly is familiar enough with the layout that she and her friend could explore on their own, which meant that for a five-dollar admission ticket, I could sit on the bench near the entrance for two hours reading the past three issues of the Sunday New York Times. Five dollars can’t be spent much more indulgently than that, in my opinion.

Tim and his friends came back to our house for dinner. While the pan of homemade macaroni and cheese baked in the oven, the boys played Ultimate Frisbee on our lawn. I’m not sure who enjoyed it more: the players or me, as I watched them, these generous and pleasant boys I’ve known since they were in preschool who will soon be teenagers.

The boys were staying for a sleepover, and after dinner they tucked into a marathon session of video games that would go on until nearly midnight. Holly does not especially like playing video games. She does like watching Tim and his friends play video games, but that night she had an even better option: my mother came over to babysit and played Holly’s favorite board game, Tea Party, with her.

It might seem odd that Rick and I went out while Tim was hosting a sleepover, but we’d already accepted an invitation before realizing this would be the ideal weekend for Tim’s party, and my mother was kind enough to say she’d come over for a few hours, so we drove a couple of miles across town to attend an annual party that about three hundred of our closest local friends also attended. We spent the evening catching up, swapping summer tales, and commiserating about back-to-school transitions. It’s so great having so many local friends; nothing beats a night out for me where I don’t have to go beyond Carlisle city limits.

On Sunday morning I made waffles and bacon for the sleepover group before they packed up and left. Just as they had at dinner on Saturday, they thanked me and praised my cooking. Midday, Tim had a baseball game: he played shortstop, Rick coached, Holly and I picnicked and watched the game from our lawn chairs. Not even the fact that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees since Saturday could keep us from enjoying the afternoon. Late in the day, Holly and I attended an event hosted by the Carlisle Conservation Foundation to introduce townspeople to a new piece of conservation land. There was fort-building, a singalong, cake, information sheets, and well-marked hiking trails. These are definitely a few of our favorite things. (Though a friend of ours at the same event commented that with almost the entire population of Carlisle tromping through the woods together, this would be an ideal time for local drugstores to practice some price-gouging on calamine lotion and other anti-poison ivy medications.) To top off a perfect day, I stopped next door to visit with my parents and resolved two technical problems they were having, one involving a text message and one involving the auto-dial feature on their cordless phone. As I’ve written about before, fixing tech-support problems makes me feel like a super-hero.

I often bemoan the fact that we don’t put our weekends to better use more of the time. We don’t devote enough time to cultural activities, especially in the city. We don’t do as many outdoor fitness activities as I would like. I don’t even cook as much on the weekends as I feel would be optimal.

But we have fun, especially on weekends like this one. Time outdoors, time at home, time with family and friends. Weekends simply don’t get much better.

The Sunday night rebound

I love going away for the weekend. I love the novelty of being somewhere else for just a night or two, getting to experience a different setting without the larger-scale effort of going on an actual vacation. Just leaving town from Friday evening to Sunday, or in the case of this weekend less: only twenty-four hours. Even twenty-four hours out of town feels special and festive to me.

What I don’t love so much is coming back. Not that I don’t also love to be home: I do. I like to get back to the familiar comforts of my own house and re-connect with whoever didn’t come with me: half the family, in the case of this weekend. I like to check on the pets and see what they’ve been lacking while I was away. I like to re-establish regular household routines, even after just a very short break from them. And not least, I’m always grateful for safe travels completed.

I don’t love coming back from a weekend away only because of the seemingly exponential trouble of catching up before a new work week begins. It just doesn’t make sense to me that as little as twenty-four hours away from home can generate this much extra work as Sunday draws to a close, and I thought this weekend would be different: I thought if I made the effort to bring fewer clothes and less food I’d spend much less time unpacking; if I spent more time leaving the house neat and taking care of tasks before we left, I’d find myself ahead of the game upon return.

But it never happens like that. I always feel overburdened upon returning, between unpacking, cleaning out the car, sorting clean from dirty laundry, getting perishables from the cooler back into the fridge, and then making dinner and ensuring that the kids have what they need for the upcoming Monday at school: snacks, lunches, permission slips, sneakers for PE class.

Common sense tells me that the best way to make Sunday evening after a trip run smoothly is to get home with plenty of time to spare. And yet my friend Nicole does exactly the opposite. When her family goes away for the weekend – which they do fairly often – she has no problem with staying out as long as possible. On Memorial Day weekend, although our families were staying in different towns, we spent an afternoon together at the beach in Maine. “What time are you heading home tomorrow?” I asked her, already thinking about Memorial Day traffic. “As late as we can,” she said. “We’ll have dinner on the porch and go back to the beach until the sun sets.”

“But how can you pull that off?” I asked her, not for the first time. “How are you organized for the new work week if you don’t leave here until after seven at night? How do you have the kids in bed on time? How do you get school lunches made?”

Nicole is a very organized person. She ticked off the ways. “We’ll have dinner before we leave for home, so that’s out of the way. The kids know the tradeoff for staying at the beach late is that they have to go straight to bed when we get home. And that it will be peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch tomorrow. They brought their homework with them. They can pack their backpacks in the morning. It works out, and we get to have more fun by staying longer.”

As I hurried around my kitchen last night at ten o'clock still trying to get ready for a new workweek, I thought about that some more. It’s not like Nicole is being cavalier: she runs a household every bit as organized as mine, plus she has to go off to work in the morning, which I don’t. And I so envy her attitude, of not marring the weekend’s fun with an early departure; if you’re having a good time, why not make it last as long as possible? Her approach makes my conservative plan to get home with plenty of time to spare on Sunday seem so parsimonious.

But honestly, I’m still not sure how she does it. We got home at five yesterday and I’m still not unpacked. The kitchen is untidy; the car hasn’t been vacuumed; and the kids will have to rummage for school snacks in the morning. I didn’t manage well at all as far as the end-of-the-weekend return home.

I want to make it work Nicole’s way: make the fun last as long as possible and then make everything fall into place in the morning. She’s lucky as well as talented in the way that her kids know exactly what they need to do to make the plan work out. Her family’s weekend included three more hours of fun than ours did, and even leaving midafternoon wasn’t enough to keep me from being frazzled by bedtime.

So I’ll keep working on it, and maybe someday I’ll figure out how Nicole makes it work when I can’t. Mostly, I just try to remind myself that part of it might be a willingness to compromise. Peanut butter and jelly for school lunches? It’s not what we normally do, but maybe the kids would agree it was worth a little extra time outdoors on a sunny Sunday.

Old friends, new friends, happy weekend

I’m feeling awash in friendship after this past weekend, suffused with a warm glow of having spent Saturday morning with new friends, Sunday evening with old(ish) friends, and time in between with church friends.

On Saturday morning, we invited a family new to town over for brunch. Sometimes those invitations work out really well and other times you end up feeling like at least you did the right thing by making an effort. This was an example of the former. The new family has a daughter in Holly’s class (which is how we met them) as well as two younger children, and all five were lovely guests. They appreciated our cooking and hosting; all the kids got along well together; they asked politely inquisitive questions of us and shared interesting information about themselves. (And, okay, they’d read my blog before coming over. So maybe that’s the real reason I liked them so much right away. But the two hours that followed their arrival didn’t disappoint either.)

On Sunday evening, a family in town well-known for their generosity in hosting huge crowds and letting enormous hordes of children run through their house invited lots of people over. It was all local families, and as is so often the case at big local get-togethers, I was struck by the extent to which everyone brought something to the table. Not literally: the hosts did all the work (“Well, it’s not as if I entertain the way you do!” my friend said on the phone that morning when I called to ask what I could bring. “This will be spaghetti with Ragu and maybe some garlic bread.” Well, yeah, but there was chocolate fondue for dessert, with not only fruit but also pretzels and marshmallows for dipping.).

But everyone who was there had something interesting to say; conversations mushroomed all over the house that were well worth listening in on. One couple had just returned from a cold, rainy Head of the Charles regatta, where they saw a rower treated for hypothermia. Another told me about how fortunate she and her husband felt about the success of their year-old start-up. A man who gives generously of his time to committees all over town updated me on the school building project. A man I hadn’t met before – the only family at the party I didn’t already know – explained to me the finer points of the town’s wastewater treatment plant. A mom discussed her 17-year-old daughter’s college search to date. A couple of parents weighed in on the school instrument program and whether my son should try out for symphonic band. Two football games played on the TV: we had Jets fans, Buffalo fans and Patriots fans all cheering their teams on. The kids played on their own all evening, needing nothing from us adults once dinner was over, and I felt so fortunate to be in the company of interesting people whom I’ve known for so long, many of them since Tim started kindergarten five years ago, a few even longer.

When people new to town comment to me on how friendly everyone is, I always offer the same explanation. “In a town without restaurants, movie theaters, bowling alleys, nightclubs or any commercial diversions whatsoever, all we have is each other,” I always say. “If we don’t reach out and get together, we’d all be bored silly.” Last night was a good example. By 5 PM, the cold rain that had fallen all afternoon had turned into a wet snow. No one felt like driving farther than across town, but we didn’t need to. Within town lay a house brimming with fun for the kids, enlightenment and good conversation for the adults, and pasta (plus chocolate) all around.

Whether my theory about socializing in Carlisle is correct or not, I’m so lucky to live in a small town where it’s easy to make friends, and it’s so rewarding to be starting the work week on a wave of goodwill inspired by the good times we had with friends old and new over the weekend.