Summertime
Well, HELLO Queer Martha! It's been a while. Sorry about that.
I am not a "summer person."
I do not like the beach. I do not like being hot. At the same time, I do not like air conditioning. I do not like mosquitoes. I do not like the pressure that I feel to "have a great summer" when all I want to do is curl up and die in a puddle of my own sweat.
Also, can I bring up the cruel irony that summer is the season of bare legs - dictated by fashion as well as the ever-looming specter of heat stroke - yet it is also the season when body hair seems to grow that fastest and thickest? Is that just me? I feel like I shave my legs in the morning for an evening out on the town bare-legged and bawdy, but by the time night arrives the state of my leg hair makes me believe that I dreamed I shaved. I know that can't be true, however. I don't dream during the summer because it is too goddamn hot to sleep.
Ever since summer break and Girl Scout Camp disappeared from my life, summer lost every redeeming quality it once had. Except delicious produce. Summer still has that delicious produce.
And yet, this has been quite the summer so far.
We bought this house. Early in June we sat down with the best darn realtor in Philly and signed the papers for a 732 square foot castle. It's a queer little house for a queer little family. We call her Lady Mildred because she lives on Mildred Street. It's not that cleverest of names, but it stuck.
We didn't move into the house then, though! We bought Lady Mildred on Friday, and on Monday we went to Ireland for a family reunion. One night in Kinsale I stayed up late in the pub below our hotel singing Bruce Springsteen's "The Streets of Philadelphia" with a bunch of drunk Dubliners, and it was a night I will not forget. Check out my family's old castle ruin:
We moved into Lady Mildred on July 10. We did it all by ourselves. We just rented a U-Haul like a bunch of dykes and moved our stuff over. Guys, I love moving. I had never actually moved myself until this year, I had only helped friends move. Moving to France and back was just a large suitcase and a guitar. Everyone always said, "When you move yourself you won't like it so much." They were wrong. This move to Lady Mildred sealed my love of moving. Maybe it's in my blood as a super lesbian.
I should specify: I love moving to. I don't particularly like moving from.
Leaving our apartment in West Philadelphia was super hard. I lived there since I moved to Philly, and I visited Rachel there before that, so the apartment has been a meaningful place in my life since 2009. The empty rooms all presented a blank canvas that I kept filling with memories. One night during the summer or 2010, soon after I moved in to the apartment, Rachel and I broke out the Trivial Pursuit and played it on the dining room floor, and when we finished the game we just stayed on the hardwood floor talking for hours and hours about life and shit. It was one of the best nights, and seeing the bare floors of the apartment made the memory so bittersweet.
I did discover, however, that I love spackling. Holy cow is that fun! Did I mean to rip off half the bedroom wall when I took down our chalkboard? No. Am I sort of happy it happened so that I could rebuild the wall with spackle? Yes. Definitely yes.
Anyway, I was sad.
But now we are here:
AHHHHH UNPACKING IS THE WORST!!!!
So we have been spending a lot of the summer trying to get this tiny little house in order. Not so much time that we couldn't take a break to buy six months of sperm, though! Our sperm arrived at our doctor's office on Monday. So there is that. We will see what happens next!
It's been a hot, emotional, and action-packed summer. I am looking forward to coming back to Queer Martha.