Our car cost us just under 2k and it worked, so we won. It needed a new battery within a month, but also the new battery cost significantly less than we’d have ever assumed it would, and then the car drove slightly faster and held a charge slightly longer. I think this puffed us up a bit, made us think we could drive the thing to upstate New York, go to the lake, it’d be nothing! Charge every now and then, and that’s cheap, if not free. We’d make it.

Of course we would.

From just outside West Philly we made it to Allentown, Pennsylvania. It took us four hours. We had to charge the car three times.

Husband doubted after the first time we had to stop, barely past Philly and the car pulled up to the wrong charger on nearly empty. We made it to one that worked seconds from limp mode, and his lips got tight around his teeth, not quite saying what he knew–we would not make it, actually. We wouldn’t make it this year.

I held on longer than that. My teeth contained, too.

The lake house is my happy place, perhaps the happiest individual location I have found in adult life. The enormous stone porch facing the water competes with the screened in porch from my childhood–vast and cozy, only slightly damp, and elevated so it collects the edge of mist in the early mornings. I have done my best work in places like this. Look backwards here on this blog, and I’ve done my best work at the lake.

It was not ego that made me know, absolutely, that something good was waiting for me on that porch in the early morning. I would probably finish my novel. I’ve always been a big believer in “the muse” being a bullshit excuse for not writing. Some elusive, magical creature does not arrive and tell me “ey bitch time to write!” I tell myself that. Then, I ignore myself.

This would be different. Porches have a mad power over me. I’d been blocked, though I don’t believe in writer’s block either. Now, the lake, just in time to force my hand across the keys. Just in time to finish. Circumstances had aligned in a way where I would face my own muse, the better version: The Spark.

The Spark is mitochondria–powerhouse of the cell. The Spark is the creative driving energy in the universe. The Spark is Chef Daddy–the first Higher Power I named that I didn’t also hate.

Chef Daddy is a kind of young, fit Santa. Chef Daddy makes an enormous meal, every day. It has everything, every ingredient and dish. He sets the table, and everyone is invited.

You may choose to eat, or not. You may choose what you eat. There will be consequences. You might be allergic, you might not like it, and you might eat it anyway. Chef Daddy cares, but does not control your hand as you reach for peanut butter or the shells he carefully shucked the muscles from. He does not stop you from eating the intact poison sack he carefully removed from the monkfish, cooked to perfection.

He lets you eat, and is glad you came to the table at all. That’s Chef Daddy.

That’s my Higher Power, kind of. One of it’s names.

Chef Daddy has never fucking stopped me from choosing to eat a method of writing. Yet yesterday, he did not make me a porch.

That being said, he served what we are now calling “the Parkinglot Vacation,” and it was delicious.

We hit five-ish parking lots at five-ish separate times. At one, in the pouring rain, the car died mere feet from the charging station. Husband got out and tried to push, but it was on an incline. There was one other car there–a mother and daughter inside. Both in nice clothes, in a nice car, though the daughter had a baggie blue hoodie pulled down over her head and dress, and she didn’t talk the whole time.

Not the kind of people one would ask for this kind of help, normally. I did when Husband couldn’t quite get the car up the incline. As if they had been wondering why they were there, seeking reason, both jumped at the chance, grinning.

Husband took the center, both ladies on either side. They pushed, hoodie girl with her head against the car as well, as if including sheer Will. Baby Girl jumped in the backseat, chanting at top volume as the car inched forward: GO DADDY GO DADDY GO DADDY!!

We made it up the hill.

Ecstatic, we plugged it in, and the rain stopped, and the sun came out, and it had been hot as ass earlier but now it was crisp and bright and we were far away from the city in bumfuck nowhere so the biggest plus was that the air tasted like life and the telephone poles cut a distinct path through the trees. The mother and daughter said goodbye, and we thanked them, and the mother called “good luck! Have a good trip!” and laughed when I responded, “Have an amazing life!” Baby Girl danced on various scrap that had been ditched in the back of the lot. Husband took a series of photos that could’ve been our album cover. Baby boy slept, and when Baby Girl said she had to go to the bathroom I tried to get her to pee in the woods with me and she didn’t. So I peed, and husband peed, and we both cackled at her sheer disgust and terror of being caught.

There was an hour spent in a pergola, too. Another hour spent at a diner, run by one man, and they had cakes that seemed to float on the cloud of frost on the case. I came home late, and the baby snored into my neck as I carried him upstairs, but he woke up soon as we hit his room and wouldn’t go back to sleep. Husband and I lent against one another and watched Discovery Plus in a stupor as he played on the ground before us, and my god, the love, the love was in my veins like pure light, and I could’ve cried when Husband sang along to some dumb song, and jesus fuck we forgot.

We forgot it could be like this.

I missed y’all.