Getting On With It

I went AWOL last week.

With all good intentions, I sat down to post, only to discover that my computer was on the blink. Again. As was my daughter. Again. And my husband was fixing to do likewise, chasing goofballs, excuse me, golfballs in Florida. I couldn't blinking take it any more. I packed a bag and grabbed the wine and headed Up North of North, into The Wild.

The Wild of the Iron Range, that is. Where I grew up. Though some might dispute that last part. The Range. Where, as they say, the men are men and so are half the women. To which I might add, You gotta problem with that? 

I guess it wasn't officially an AWOL, seeing as how I announced my intentions beforehand.

"I'm going AWOL!" I announced to my daughter and my husband, in a text message and an email, respectively. I didn't get a response for eighteen hours. It was my daughter, asking what AWOL meant. She thought it was some texting abbreviation I made up.

I blasted KQ and drove at the speed of light and made it through the forcefield to my friend's doorstep by the cocktail hour.

In case you weren't aware, there's a forcefield surrounding the Iron Range. Like a restricted zone. Non-Rangers -- known as aliens -- take their lives in their hands when entering. But having grown up there, I'm in possession of a natural masking hormone, which allows me to enter and leave the area undetected. Once inside, I can move about at random, virtually invisible, able to pass for just another local skag who used to shoot rats at the dump with your cousin, or maybe it was you, but who's keeping score.

I careened to a stop and staggered up to my friend's doorstep and she immediately broke out a corkscrew and she immediately broke it.

"I've still got my jacket on!" I gasped, one hand on the doorknob. "I can drive to the liquor store and get another one! Or five!"

The guy at the liquor store always remembers me.

I met him ten years ago, when my mother died. I was in town for several weeks and his establishment was within walking distance of my parents' house. Only twenty miles. He even let my dog come into the store with me, like Petticoat Junction. By the time I left, we were old friends. Now we're ancient.

I think I used to shoot rats at the dump with his cousin.

But back to the story.

My friend and I stood staring at one another, aghast and agog, you might say, the corkscrew lying lifeless between us, when out of the blue, I conjured my mother. Or maybe she conjured herself.

But suddenly there she was, hovering in the darkening air, trying with all her otherworldly might to change the script, redirect the action, affect the outcome. Why, you might ask? Because, dead or alive, my mother recognized that broken corkscrew for what it was: a Sign.

Not that I disagree. The difference being one of interpretation. To my mother, that broken corkscrew was screaming, Do Not Drink Tonight Or Ever Again You Besotted Wastrel! Whereas my friend and I saw it as a suggestion of Power, i.e., our Powerful friendship, our Powerful intellects, you get the idea. As with anything, it's all in the eye of the beholder.

My mother always beheld me as having drifted from her vision of who I should be. Which is the usual case with parenting. But in my mother's interpretation, I didn't so much drift, as get myself hopelessly shipwrecked. On some remote desert island, far from land. From Herland, that is. 

In my interpretation, I wasn't shipwrecked, I escaped. To a private little paradise called My Own Blinking Life. Not that my life is paradise. But it's my life, not my mother's, which makes it paradisiacal enough for me. Just a quiet little wayside where the bar's always open and I can come and go undetected and I have at least one friend who'll light the lamp and break out the corkscrew when I careen to a stop at the curb outside her door.

Robert Frost said, Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in. To which I might add, And they always have a spare corkscrew. Which my friend had, and eventually found, and so we got on with it.