#and the easter service made me feel sick to my stomach while I watched it it was all so good

[myaekingheart]

summer road trip 2018 ; day four

Nothing too eventful today. My grandparents were out of the house early this morning, as they are avid churchgoers and had to attend choir practice before the service. They told me not to worry about joining them and to just sleep as long as I wanted, especially since my mom implanted the idea of my being in bed until 1pm into their brains. Much to everyone’s surprise, I didn’t sleep that long. My stomach woke me up around 10am, and I laid in bed for an extra hour scrolling through my phone, blowing my nose, wiping my watery eyes, and cursing the pollen gods for torturing me like so. When I finally did get up, I nearly died by how sweet my grandparents are. They set a place at the table for me before they left for when I did wake up and get breakfast: a bowl for my cereal, two glasses for juice and water, a spoon, and a napkin. I poured myself some Honey Bunches of Oats, orange juice, and water and went to town watching the wildlife out their window and checking out facebook to see what pictures everyone posted from the wedding last night. Funny enough, my grandparents came home right when I was finishing my food. They entered the house quietly so as to not wake me up if I was still asleep, but I heard them and turned around to say good morning. The rest of the day was really relaxed and not worth mentioning much of but I’m going to detail the minutia anyways because...that’s just what I do. So after I was done breakfast, my Pop Pop went out to do his usual grocery shopping and I hopped in the shower. Perhaps my biggest regret was either not getting one last night or using so much hairspray on my bangs because while I was glad they were plastered in place, they made brushing a bitch when I was getting ready for bed. I tried rinsing most of it out but to no avail. The only way to fix it would to be wash it out myself in the shower. Washing my hair was kind of nerve-wracking, though. I was scared of how it’d look after the fact, what with the fiasco from yesterday and all. Fortunately it wasn’t totally terrible but I mean, I had to brush it so that it would lay correctly and remember to part it on the left side instead of the right and because I don’t have layers or anything, the rest of my hair looks really drab and frizzy and shit. I guess this is the price I pay. For what, I have no fucking idea. Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on my hair for too long anyways. After my shower, I got dressed and then hung out for a bit. When my Pop Pop came back, he asked me if I was hungry and I told him I was so they grabbed all their lunch fixings and let me go to town. I had a turkey and cheese sandwich with mustard on a roll, potato chips, and three chocolate chip cookies. So a very well-rounded meal, I think. I also saw five deer within ten minutes, four of which were all together, in my grandmother’s backyard (seeing as their house backs right up into the woods and she is legit Snow White, setting out bird feeders and bird baths and corn to attract all the cool wildlife, and she takes incredible pictures of them). Afterward, I decided to catch up on my Mermay drawings since I got really behind what with the road trip and the wedding and all that good stuff so I mapped out what I was going to do for my four pieces and began tracking down supplies. I don’t have a sketchbook to draw them in-- the first two were just on regular printer paper-- so I was going to do the same for these next four but my grandmother, who takes art classes and is a really talented watercolor painter, grabbed a blank sketchbook she had with her supplies and a pencil and a quality eraser and let me go nuts. I sat at the kitchen table working for a bit, and I got through two drawings, before I started to feel kind of...off. It was the typical lightheadedness and stomach cramps I get sometimes and I was seriously scared I was going to eventually get sick. I tried to push through it like I always do but to no avail, so I resolved to migrating back into the guest room for a “nap” to try and regroup. I didn’t necessarily think I was tired but I ended up falling asleep for two hours anyways so I guess I lacked more energy than I thought. I woke up to my grandmom knocking on the door to let me know dinner was ready. As someone who has not had a good, well-rounded, home-cooked meal like this in a while, I was pretty satisfied with the food. We had honey citrus chicken that was good but a little too mild for my taste (my grandmom tweaked the recipe a bit so that it had less cayenne pepper in it-- I liked it enough to want to make it myself at home for my boyfriend, but I’m definitely going to use the recommended amount of seasoning this time for more a kick), corn, rice medley, and Hawaiian sweet rolls. I didn’t eat all of everything seeing as my stomach was still feeling a little iffy but I tried my best to eat as much as I could. The rice probably went down the easiest, to be honest, but then again I am lowkey addicted to rice and it was really fucking yummy so, you know, fuck it. I don’t always like using this term, either, but “rice is a safe food.” I mean, hey, the BRAT diet exists for a reason and without rice, it would just be the BAT diet. I didn’t think I could handle dessert but my Pop Pop bought two whole containers of fresh strawberries and he cut them up and sugared them and my grandmom scooped them into dishes with whipped cream and I honestly could not resist. They were delicious and I took my time eating them and basically cleared the bowl. It was really nice, too, because my Pop Pop went into the dining room to answer some phone calls about business stuff so my grandmom and I were left by ourselves at the kitchen table to have a really interesting conversation about relationships. I can’t for the life of me remember how we got on the subject but it was really cool to hear stories from the old days when she and my Pop Pop were young. They’ve known each other since they were ten, and will have been married for 61 years this week. They met through church and apparently their first interaction was in a contest that she beat him in by selling more one more box of candy Easter eggs than he did. She told me about how he’d always carry on in the back of their meetings, and she’d tell him that if he couldn’t shut up he should just go home. She told me about how she wasn’t allowed to go steady as a teenager because her father believed that you needed to experience multiple different types of people and personalities in relationships rather than committing to just one person and restricting yourself to that without ever knowing what else anyone was like, and if you were making a mistake or settling or something, which I thought was a really interesting concept honestly. She told me about a boy she was with once that she really thought would be the one but he was in a military family and was shipped out to Texas the day after a dance she asked him to, and that he had to borrow a tux from someone because all of his clothes were packed but he did, in fact, take her, but then didn’t write her for a year because he apparently lost her address and didn’t get it back until his mother came back into town and looked it up. She told me about how my Pop Pop asked her to his senior prom (she had already graduated-- she’s a year or two older than him) and that was how they started dating. Then when my Pop Pop was off the phone he came back in and we talked about the good old days at their previous church and all the crazy activities they held like a Minstrel Show where my grandmom played something whose name I forget but go to wear a crown, and my Pop Pop was someone named Mr. Bones and had a Scotch plaid cummerbund and bow tie; the “Womanless Wedding” where all the men dressed as women, and two of them were belly dancers in the little bras with bare stomachs and my Pop Pop was Maude and how they were all in the back trying to figure out how to put on bras to give the illusion of breasts; the “Tom Thumb Wedding” where my mom as a child was the bride even though she had a 102 fever-- she insisted on doing it anyways. It’s funny because I had always thought back to my other grandfather, my dad’s dad, who passed away in 2014 and how he always told me stories of when he was a kid and how there were times when I didn’t really listen or appreciate the value of it. Now that he’s gone, I still regret not engaging in that history so now that I have a chance at that again with my mother’s parents, I want to take advantage of it and really listen because I don’t see them very often and they’re getting up there, as well (my grandmother is an 83 year old breast cancer survivor). I don’t want them to pass away without having learned about their histories and really paid attention to them. The thought of going through that remorse every day again breaks my heart, honestly. So if I have anything else to say, it’s to actually listen to older people and open your mind to stories of the olden days because they’re far more enriching than you think they are and in the end, you’ll feel closer to that person by knowing their memories and their past. Just a thought.

#summer road trip 2018 #ramblings