Reflections on the Third Week of Summer – Fresh Air Guests

    “It’s not that Chris doesn’t like you. We just won’t be sleeping in your house,” my daughter Ellen said over the phone when she arranged their Fourth of July visit.

    During their two or three night visits in the past, my son-in-law’s allergies reacted to Wells Wood greenery and resident cats. He carried around a box of tissues, sneezed continuously, and swallowed antihistamines.

    How would he survive a six night visit?

    Ellen and Chris arrived June 29 with matching grins. After two-and-a-half years of marriage, they still acted like newly weds. They stood side by side but not shoulder to shoulder. He’s a head taller. Tall and short, they squeezed onto the loveseat on the porch. Ellen rose early. Chris didn’t. Her answer to, “Would you like breakfast now,” was always, “I’ll wait for Christopher.” When Chris woke and Ellen asked if he was ready to eat, he’d say, “Whatever you want, Little One.” And they walked together. Despite his allergies, Chris enjoyed camping and hiking. “I like to tell people I’m a card carrying Eagle Scout—” he said pulling a white plastic card from his wallet and handing it to me “—even though the card expired.”

    After supper on the day they arrived, Chris and Ellen walked around the house in search of a spot away from rain run-off paths. He chose a flat site on the sloping yard below the deck and pitched his goldfinch-yellow Big Agnes Big House 4 Tent with a rain cover.

    Then they walked down our country road.

    I washed dishes and looked through the kitchen window at Spence transplanting zucchini seedlings in the north garden. Dark clouds crept across the sky. Wind blew Spence’s straw hat off his head. Thunder rumbled. Then rain pounded.

Spence tramped onto the porch, stuck his head through the doorway, and said, “Are the children back yet?”

    “No—” Before I could utter another word, he spun around and tramped down the porch steps. The crunch of pickup tires on gravel and dirt faded down the road.

    Ten minutes later, the rain stopped, the pickup returned, and a wet, laughing pair burst into the kitchen. Rain water dripped from their hair and saturated their shirts. Ellen said,    “We’d walked down to the metal bridge. Then the rain started.”

    Yikes. That’s a mile and a half away. I handed them towels.

    “Dad picked us up by the blue house.”

    They’d walked three quarters of a mile in the downpour. Subsequent walks to escape cat allergens were drier.

   They supplemented daily walks through the woods and along country roads with excursions Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to

  ● Voodoo Brewery in Meadville,

  ● Conneaut Cellars Winery in Conneaut Lake,

  ● Lago Winery in Jamestown,

  ● Mortals Key Brewing Company in Jamestown, and

  ● Premium Outlets in Grove City.

    Chris also spent hours on the porch reading The Lives of Tao and drawing spheres. George jumped onto the loveseat beside his buddy and stretched his head toward Chris. Holding the paperback in his right hand, cat lover Chris petted George with his left.

    The loveseat sittings, excursions, and walks couldn’t keep  Chris’s allergies away.

    On the porch Monday morning, I took a deep breathe of the spicy-sweet fragrance of milkweeds and said, “Don’t milkweeds smell wonderful, Chris?”

    He glanced from his paperback to the pink blossoms attracting great spangled fritillary butterflies in the field. “I don’t know. I’m congested. I can’t smell a thing.”

    Ellen and Chris would have had to leave early except for the yellow tent.

    After they’d dried from their wet walk that first night, they dressed in tent-sleeping-clean clothes, ones without any odors of food eaten during the day. Thunder rumbled.

    “We don’t have to sleep outside,” Chris said.

    “But,” Ellen said, “you’ve been looking forward to sleeping in the tent.”

    They stared out the sliding glass door.

    Rain splatted the deck, lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled louder.

    Chris put his arm around Ellen’s shoulders.“It’s okay if we sleep inside.”

    She turned, put her hands on his chest, and said with a wide smile, “We can be brave.”

    They stepped outside, opened umbrellas, and walked to the tent.

    Lightning flashed. Thunder crashed.

    They were brave.

    I wouldn’t have slept in a tent during a thunderstorm, but I sure was curious to know what it was like. In the morning, I sat at the kitchen table with a pen and a paper headed tent report. After they’d taken a few bites of Spence’s special bacon, sausage, and omelet breakfast, I asked, “How was your night in the tent?”

   They paused with forks midway to their mouths and shared amused grins. No doubt they suspected, and would be right, that I’d repeat that question every morning during their visit.

    Ellen set her fork down. “It was cozy. The rain was loud and, when lightning flashed, everything lit up.”

    Chris swallowed a bite of omelet. “It was nice. I heard water dripping everywhere.”

Ellen said, “It’s funny to think it rained so much and we stayed dry.”

    The next night a crack of lightning and boom of thunder hit simultaneously right above the log house, or so said Spence and our son Charlie when I woke the next morning. I’d slept through the crash. Ellen and Chris hadn’t.

    Ellen said, “A firefly got lost between the tent and the rain cover so we’re laying there and the bug went—” She held her closed fists in the air then flicked her fingers open and closed. “—beep.” She coordinated finger flicking and sounds for “Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beepbeepbeepbeep.”

    I chuckled.

    Ellen said, “Then the thunder boomed RIGHT OVERHEAD–really loud. The lightning bug went beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep. Her fingers flicked rapidly with the sound effects.

    I guffawed and spit oatmeal back into my bowl.

    On succeeding mornings tent reports included chilly-damp air, struggles for blanket possession, and noises other than pounding rain.

    Saturday Chris reported a chipmunk chirped and brushed against the outside of the tent in the morning.

    Monday Ellen said, “Fireworks went off everywhere. To my left was an owl. To my right was George wailing with the hairy snake [his cat toy].”

    Wednesday she said, “I woke up in the middle of the night to bozos making lots of noise driving down the road fast.”

    Chris said, “There was something larger than a chipmunk chittering outside the tent–a raccoon, skunk, or possum.”

Though these reports enriched my mornings, I didn’t forget the serious reason for Chris pitching the tent. Sleeping outdoors, combined with his fresh air porch sittings, excursions, and walks, kept Chris breathing through the week.

    The day after they left, Spence returned from mowing the field and interrupted my daydreams about Chris and Ellen pitching a tent in snow on their Thanksgiving visit. Spence said, “Daryl stopped to talk.”

    Daryl, a full time farmer and Spence’s part time tractor repairman, lives a mile away on the top of the hill. “What did Daryl have to say?”

    “Plenty. Daryl took his girlfriend for a ride on his ATV around midnight on the Fourth of July and saw a cat in the corn field. The corn was knee high and the cat was taller. The girlfriend said it had a long thin tail with a curl at the end.” Spence moved his hand up diagonally then made a backward C at the top.

    “A mountain lion?”

    “Yep,” Spence said, “Daryl couldn’t believe what his eyes had seen so he stopped to ask about the mountain lion we saw when we first build the log house. And Daryl said Downey’s—”

    I visualized the lane to Downey’s farm half a mile away.

    “—caught a picture of a bear on their motion camera in the woods. It had a huge head–probably the same 300 pound bear that Stacey said visited her farm.”

    A bear and a mountain lion had roamed our neighborhood while Ellen and Chris slept in the tent? Double yikes.