Spring

I haven't been posting a lot lately; it's springtime, we've been loving exploring the Nevada desert, and I have been trying to get us ready to go back to the NW this weekend. We haven't been back in almost a year, and we are so excited to see our friends and family!

I did want to post a quick poem that I wrote this week. I was challenged to write one poem a week during the month of April. For inspiration, I thought about spring, and the equinox, and life growing and sprouting. Just then, Robo-Kid thrust himself into my arms, and my first poem popped into my brain. It's far from perfect, but perfection isn't the point of creativity!

I write a lot of poems, but I don't often post them because for some reason, it makes me feel very vulnerable. But you know what? I don't care! Bring on the vulnerability! Bring on the people brutally tearing apart my work and screaming about my lack of talent! As my friend Tina said yesterday,

"All art is beautiful!" Make some of your own today!

Spring

I find it in your freckles.

In the scent of soil and sweat on your cheeks

The salty, gamy whiff as you lean in to me

Eager to share your fresh discoveries

New adventures

The world as dewy and unrestrained as it has ever been

Wild and fertile and lush with pink sunshine.

I find it in your grin.

Gap toothed and hilarious

Ready to split open and howl at the slightest amusement

Primitive and sweet and riotous as the birds above

Bellowing in their singular voices

With no attempt at harmony

Rejoicing in the sound that belongs only to you.

Normalize Laundry

I need your help, my friends. I need you to start hanging your laundry outside. There are lots and lots and lots of reasons you should do this, and I'm going to give them to you, right now.

1: Hanging laundry outside is much better for the environment. The average American household dries 24 loads of laundry per month. The average dryer uses about 4000 watts per hour. On contrast, your refrigerator only uses about 1000 watts per hour. And I think we can all agree that food is more important than dried clothes, yes?

2: Hanging your clothes to dry will save you a nice chunk on your electric bill. When we were in Texas, our electricity was 11 cents per kilowatt hour, so drying a load of laundry would have cost us approximately 44 cents. With a family of six and a minimalist wardrobe, we still do about six loads a week, which means that we would have spent about $12 a month on electricity, just for our dryer. Here in Nevada, the price per kilowatt hour is higher.

3: Your clothes will never smell as fresh or be as nicely pressed as when you dry them on a clothesline or drying rack. Give it a try! Yes, the slight crunchiness of them takes a little getting used to. But you will, and eventually it won't bother you anymore, and you will love the fresh sunshiney-ness of them.

4: Drying clothes on a line or rack will lengthen their lives, too. You know that sweater that you loved to pieces and eventually wore out? Or those pants that were sooooo comfy and made your bum look spectacular, but had to throw out because they got all pilly? Drying them on the line will help prevent stuff like that. Pills on your clothes come from friction, which happens when your favorite pants are tossed up against your sweaters, towels, and underwear IN THE DRYER. It won't happen on the clothesline!

 5: But the most important reason to dry your clothes on the line is to normalize it. I'm dead serious. I read just the other day about a homeowners' association that put "no clotheslines" in their bylaws. I was in the laundry room with a woman last summer in Ohio, and when I mentioned that I was planning to wash my clothes and then hang them out to dry, she said,

"My husband won't let me do that. He says he doesn't want to live like gypsies." I absolutely guarantee that the racism of that statement is far more hideous and appalling than the sight of a family's laundry wafting in the breeze.

We've had RV parks say specifically in their rules "No clotheslines; no drying racks." Apparently clothes hanging outside are horribly ugly? When did that become a thing?

Keep in mind that I am not talking about showing your underoos to the world. Any experienced clotheslineologist (that's a new word I made up; tell your friends) can show you ten different ways to camouflage or hide your unmentionables. Yesterday I simply made a little shield out of my gorgeous, colorful Turkish towels and put underwear on the inside of my drying rack. You can even buy little hanger things with clips on them, and hang bras and underwear in the shower.

FYI: never ever ever put a bra in the dryer, friends. Just don't do it, especially not if it has an underwire. That's not me being preachy. It's science.

Clothes blowing in the breeze are BEAUTIFUL. They are downright wholesome! Want to please your grandmother, who probably grew up during the Great Depression and couldn't fathom paying for something that the sun and air will do for free? Hang up your clothes.

If our climate is changing, and it certainly appears to be, one of the best things we can all do is reduce the amount of energy that we use. Hanging your laundry on a line is SO easy, so cheap, and so much better for your clothes! And if everyone does it, more RV parks will start allowing it. Help me out, friends!

1300 Miles, Three Days

Oh my goodness, you guys. You may have noticed that I haven't posted in a few days. You may not have, too, and that's okay. But here is what we have been up to:

Last Thursday, we left Texas after three glorious months. We loved our RV park, we loved the Austin area, we loved the friends that we made and the wonderful people we met. Sometimes I am in awe of how lucky we are, to be able to travel and explore new places. I loved San Marcos, and we will definitely be back!

On Thursday we drove into a tiny town in West Texas called Van Horn, about 100 miles east of El Paso, to stay overnight. Van Horn is basically a town full of RV parks, which makes me think that it must be a place where a lot of people stop overnight. It's kind of worn down, but when we got out of the car, all six of us turned our faces toward the sun and said, 

"Aaaaah."

San Marcos was damp and cool all winter, although certainly not cold. But we had been struggling with keeping the humidity down in our RV for a while. As soon as we left the hill country area of Texas, the air dried out, the sky turned super blue, and the temperature went up about seven degrees. It felt GOOD.

Friday, we got an early start and drove from Van Horn, across the lower corner of New Mexico. New Mexico is a fascinating state, and a part of me wishes that we had stayed for longer. It's hard to wrap my brain around the idea that if we want to stay and explore, we can. But we did have a reservation to keep.

We made it through NM, to a Costco in Tucson. Tucson is a gorgeous city, but nearly all of the RV parks are exclusive to the 55 and over set, and the ones that aren't are pretty expensive. So on Thursday, Jesse called the Costco and asked them if they would allow us to camp there overnight. The manager was awesome and said that while they don't normally let people do that, they'd make an exception for us. Maybe they looked at our spending record. Either way, we did some grocery shopping, had a delicious dinner of pizza, chicken bakes, and yogurt sundaes, and moved on before they opened the next morning.

Saturday was our longest drive, although only by about 20 miles. We drove northwest, over the Nevada border, through Las Vegas, and into the small town of Pahrump. The drive was stunningly beautiful. We saw saguaros and Joshua trees and the Hoover Dam and more blooming cacti than I can count. I could study the desert plant life for a decade and not be able to identify all the different species. The birds were fascinating too: weird vulture-y things that were obviously eating roadkill, but didn't have ugly vulture faces, tiny songbirds in every shade of brown, that disappeared into the brush as soon as you saw them, and other birds that looked suspiciously like parrots.

We chose to stay in Pahrump because seventeen years ago, Jesse and I drove through it on our way to Las Vegas to get married and thought it was an interesting town. It hasn't changed much; it's still on the dinky side, but the nature is fantastic. It rained yesterday, so everything smells like flowers today. Our RV park has a great view of the mountains, too, and unlike the "mountains" in Ohio or Tennessee, they are big and craggy and covered in snow. Beautiful!

Sometimes I cannot believe how lucky we are.