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A Rainy Weekend

A Rainy Weekend

Last updated on: July 3, 2023 at 1:27 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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A Rainy Weekend 2023-07-03T13:27:48-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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The weekend was not terribly good.

Saturday I woke up and found there was no coffee except for the sour, unpleasant coffee concentrate that comes in a bottle. We’d run out of the pitcher of cold brew I’d made, and there wasn’t another bag to brew in the fridge. There was also no lettuce for the guinea pig– that was easily fixed. I picked some lettuce and wild plantain from the garden and the messy lawn to fill her dish. But I don’t grow coffee berries, so I drank the bottled coffee.

I got on my phone and realized Twitter was out of temper. Billionaires are apparently as bad at paying their bills on time as the rest of us, and the hellsite was unusable. I suppose I should have been grateful for the break.

It was raining when we went to Aldi for my least favorite kind of shopping, the kind where you have a long list of things you need but a two digit number in the checking account. This had been a bad week. Everything was fine for a bit, and then it wasn’t. That’s just how living from writing project to writing project and mostly out of a tip jar works. One week you’re rich and one week you have nothing again. You sail until you sink. This had been a sinking week. We packed the cloth shopping bag with new coffee and the five pound vat of hamburger while I grumbled about everything. I was feeling exceptionally exhausted and out of sorts; I thought it was the sour coffee.

I scrolled on my phone in the Walmart parking lot next, while Michael and Adrienne ran in for gluten free noodles and her preferred jar of Ragu with the last of the money. Twitter was still out of temper. This meant my blog views would crash, as most of my traffic comes from Twitter followers, and my tiny monthly paycheck would get tinier– not to mention, if everyone was getting a “rate limit exceeded” warning, no one was going to see the tip jar. Next week just might be worse than this one, if things go on.

I felt more exhausted than ever.

It had stopped raining when we finished our errands. The pools would all be closed and I didn’t have the cash for a day pass anyway, but the lake was free. I packed my bathing suit for a trip to Raccoon Creek– and, to my great delight, Adrienne asked to come along. She broke her phone two weeks ago and we haven’t been able to replace it, and she doesn’t like to go on long car trips without a phone to listen to music, but by now she was stir crazy and ready for an adventure.

There’s terrifying construction on the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge this week, which is how we ended up crossing the Ohio at the Market Street Bridge instead and getting in the wrong lane of Route 22 at the bend. Instead of going all the way to the Burgettstown exit, we ended up in the Red Light District of Weirton, right off the freeway, next to windowless establishments with names like THE FOUNDRY and THE STARS AND STRIPES. I felt that exhaustion and anger building up again, as if a lot worse had happened than taking the wrong exit. I shook it off, and got on the Steubenville Pike.

It’s fun to drive on the Steubenville Pike, though it takes a bit longer than Route 22. The Pike takes you up through Weirton to the village of Paris, Pennsylvania, past rolling green hills and beautiful old houses and churches with obnoxious illuminated kiosks. We drove in quiet for twenty suspenseful minutes, afraid we’d miss the turn, but there it was. And then we found that the road in front of Raccoon Creek Park was also closed for construction, so we took the back way around by the Christmas tree farm and the Wildflower reserve. Everything looked fresh and alive after all that rain; we saw barn swallows diving right at the car, and wild turkeys browsing in the tall grass. All was green on green, smelling of petrichor, the way the world ought to be.

When we finally pulled into the beach and threw on our swimsuits, twenty minutes later than we’d hoped, thunder started to rumble in the distance.

The other swimmers were fleeing the water as Adrienne waded in.

We went home, the back way, through green on green in big fat drops of slow, lazy summer rain.

When we finally got back into Steubenville, with the gas gauge near E, the sun was coming out.

I would’ve turned around and gone back to the beach if not for the gas– and besides, the wave of tiredness crashed over me again. My back started to ache as if I’d actually managed to get an hour of exercise instead of nearly two hours of driving. I collapsed.

I started to run a fever. The exhaustion and crankiness had not been because of the bad coffee. I was sick.

Adrienne and I sat in bed together, me scrolling on my phone and she on the cracked tablet, chatting, complaining, reading. Twitter was still on the fritz, so I amused myself with looking at real estate listings and fantasizing about how I’d fix up the gardens. Adrienne reminded me that none of her jeans fit anymore, her t-shirts are wearing out, and she wants her ears pierced and her hair dyed blue before she goes to school– and did I remember that she still needed a phone? I asked if she’d won the lottery lately.

Eventually she brought up the guinea pig, who burrowed under the quilts to keep me company.

We “voiced” a story with the characters we used to play with in her dollhouse. She is too grown up for her toys anymore, but she still likes to make up funny stories, and since she is dyslexic, she makes them up aloud. We’ve turned the hilarious dollhouse world into an imaginary sitcom. Lately most of our stories circle around the dollhouse eldest daughter, Beezus, who wants to be a movie star when she grows up. Beezus has recruited the eccentric neighborhood children into acting in the science fiction films she writes and records on her phone for a Youtube channel, but lately she got too bossy so they formed a union and went on strike. They keep demanding a percentage of the profits from the films. Beezus keeps insisting that the films make no profit. I can relate to Beezus. I got very into the role.

It was just one of those weekends where everything went wrong, but not horribly wrong, not catastrophically or comically wrong. Only wrong in a mundane way.

Anyway, that’s why I’ve been too exhausted to write the past few days. I dattempted to drive on Route 22 when I didn’t know I was coming down with a bug, and now I’m on the mend.

That’s what I did when I wasn’t here.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.

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