Gimme Shelter

"We got the house!"

Zelda sounded pretty happy when I called her from the little theater in the student center, where Sanctified Brethren College was staging Proof. Her mother and I had just found our seats, along with Trainer Sue, and I was turning off my cell phone when I noticed I'd missed a call. There was just enough time before the curtain for that bit of exciting news from the daughter.

A little backstory might be in order here. Zelda and her friend Zannah have been looking for an apartment, and they found a double they liked in Hipville. She's been out of college for one year, seven months, and six days (but who's counting?) and still living at home (not that we mind!) and has wisely taken her time in making the next big move into Her Own Place.

She's a level-headed, fun-loving, logical-linear, visual-spatial, bookish, Norwegian-Scots-Bohemian-French, hyphenated-American young woman, but when it's time, it's time.

The play was excellent, by the way, four actors on a spare stage, great dialog a plot full of family tensions with equal parts push and pull - father-daughter, sister-sister, boy-girl - and not surprisingly, the mutual understanding of the brilliant father and even more brilliant daughter (it's a math thing, you [and I] wouldn't understand), tinged with toxic codependence, got my attention. Kudos to the SBC theater department. It took all of two minutes for me to suspend disbelief and buy into the characters, their peculiar states of mind, and their world. There is nothing like live theater.

The next night, it was warm and dry with a slight breeze, so Gven and I slept outside in the new tent, still standing after its initial setup. First we unstaked it and moved it to a different patch of grass, revealing a pale square of lawn that will soon recover, we hope. Each of us holding the middle of two flexible poles, we walked it over a few paces and put it down again, with the wind catching it momentarily like a big kite.

With a couple of yoga mats and a couple of quilts as padding, we slept just fine with the rain fly off and the stars visible through the netting. It was kind of a trial run for when we go to Michigan in September and kind of a flashback to days and nights in a homemade tent called Om Shanty in the woods of Strawberry Mountain Farm, Walker County, Georgia, once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away.

We slept inside the next couple of nights, then on a warm night I decided at the last minute to sleep outside again. Gven had already gone to bed, but it was cooler outside, and the moon and stars were out, so I lay down on the mats and quilts in the tent. A crash of lightning and thunder woke me up at about 3 o'clock, and I decided it was time to take down the tent.

It only took a few minutes to stow the bedding, and the long, collapsible poles folded right up and went in their little bag. In no time the tent was folded up and stashed in the workshop, just as it started to rain. The wind coming in through the bedroom window felt amazing, and as I came down from the adrenaline rush, it didn't take too long to go to sleep. And we needed the rain.

So the initial field-test is completed, I know how to put it up and take it down, and we're more or less ready to go to Michigan in a month or so. Not so sure about the handy air mattress with its own built-in pump (only $19.99 at Meijer).