My husband and I recently took a trip to St Petersburg, Florida. He had an art show, and I used the ten days away as a solo writing retreat. We rented a house with a fenced yard and took both dogs.
A lot happened in the time we were gone, but here’s a summary: I forgot to refill my sleep meds before we left, without which there would be no sleep—for me, but also for my husband, as I hate to not-sleep alone. Poodle, our sixteen-year-old cockapoo with gallbladder disease, decided on a whim to hate his food. The other dog, Lulabell, got her leg caught in the slats of a picnic bench and almost broke it trying to free herself; the next day, she threw up twice, including once on the arm of the sofa. Later that same day, she crashed into the closed sliding glass door, thinking it was open.
The first night I cooked, I burned a large patch of my wrist on the oven, and the next morning, my husband got asthma from the aforementioned sofa. Meanwhile, back in Chattanooga, an ice storm was brewing and my husband and I worried about trees falling on our house, and in Atlanta, my sister from Colorado was visiting our ninety-seven-year-old mother for what she felt was probably the last time.
Traveling, as I always say, is hard. There are long hours in a vehicle, punctuated by meals you would never eat in your own town—here’s looking at you, Subway sandwich consisting of two bites of chicken and a single banana pepper slice tucked into a glutinous wrap the size of a sofa cushion—and visits to restrooms that make you question humanity.
Getting my sleep meds was easy enough, requiring only that I contact my doctor with the address and phone number of the Walmart closest to our rental house, and then get there before nightfall after a ten-hour drive.
On the other hand, wrangling a prescription from my vet in Chattanooga for the food Poodle would eat from a PetSmart in St. Pete was like trying to buy a car in space.
And while the rental house was passable, it, too, had issues, primary among them the fact that it reeked of a thousand sick dogs flattened by a sliding glass door, and featured a kitchen so ill-equipped it rivalled the kitchen of my early adulthood, when I owned single frying pan and one floppy steak knife.
But my husband and I are nothing if not one another’s cheerleaders, and so when one of us descended into despair over the funky smell or our third degree burns or our inability to breathe, the other jumped in with reassurances of better days ahead.
Thankfully, I got my meds and slept, and Poodle got his food and ate. Lulabell survived her near-death experiences, and went on to enjoy a walk on the beach. My husband had a good show, I did a lot of writing, and I returned to the stove to cook, night after night, the freshest seafood we’d had in a long time. We even partook of some lovely Sicilian wines, and not just because we needed to blot out the difficulties, but to celebrate, because, in spite of everything, we were happy to be there all together, dogs included.
There were other positives as well: The dog yard was shady and expansive, and there was a lush starfruit tree smack in the middle of it, which yielded up perfectly ripe fruit for my yogurt every morning. There were also two orange trees from which hung fat, orange globes; these I squeezed into a pot along with a few diced starfruit and some strawberries to make a compote for toast. We decided to start re-watching Schitt’s Creek, which we found ourselves loving all over again; it was a bittersweet reunion, especially as the actress Catharine O’Hara, who played Moira, passed away unexpectedly that week.
One of those evenings, I opened the New York Times app on my phone and read an Oliver Burkman article. As is almost always the case when I read in bed, I retained very little of what I took in, but one thing stayed with me: his statement that we don’t always have to pursue resolutions to our problems. Sometimes, he wrote, it’s enough to simply explore our difficulties with an eye toward how they make our life interesting—meaning it’s curiosity, not resolution, that gives heft and texture to our life.
When I look back on the week in St. Pete, the good and the bad experiences stand out equally. But it’s the whole rollercoaster of small and large frustrations and celebrations and annoyances and worries and resolutions that says, in no uncertain terms, that we went somewhere. In both body and mind, we traveled.
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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. Publication history and more at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].