by Donna Poole
“Why? Just why? God knew how badly we needed this vacation, especially you!”
It was bedtime at the end of a week full of challenges and disappointments.
Jeremy sighed. “Julie, we don’t question God.”
“Maybe you don’t but I do sometimes, and I’m in good company. The Psalms are full of ‘why’ and ‘how long’!”
Jeremy sighed again. “I should have listened to Danny.”
“I wanted you to say yes when he offered to haul our camper somewhere for us so we could have a real vacation instead of this disaster of a staycation.”
“We both agreed Danny was too busy, and we didn’t want to bother him. And you helped me make that long list of projects we wanted done on the house.”
Julie hugged him. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. I don’t want to make you feel any worse. But sometimes I think we hold the Guiness record for vacations that turned out to be anything but! I should have known. I should have listened to my friend Bobby.”
“Is Bobby one of your thousand Facebook friends? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention a Bobby.”
Julie shook her head. “No. He’s one of my high school friends, but he’s dead now.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, babe. I know you’ve been losing a few classmates recently. I guess that has to be expected when we’ve been out of high school for sixty years.”
She couldn’t resist. They really needed to laugh. “That’s okay, honey. He was dead when he was my friend in high school too.”
She laughed then. The look on his face said, “You needed a vacation worse than I thought!”
She’d tease him a little longer. “He should have been your friend in high school too, but maybe not. I know your marching band was better than ours, or so you say, but I’m not so sure about your academics. Bobby wasn’t your friend? He never told you about accidentally destroying a mouse’s home while ploughing his fields? He even wrote a poem about it.”
“If I knew any Bobby who was upset about ploughing up a mouse’s nest I think I’d remember it, and I’d also think he was a rather strange dude.”
“Hey everyone loved him! Except snobs and hypocrites. And since you weren’t either, I’m surprised you weren’t his friend.”
“Knock it off, babe. After the week of non-vacation I’ve had with everything going wrong that possibly could, I’m really not in the mood for riddles. No, I wasn’t friends with any dead Bobby who wrote poems to mice.”
“I was just trying to make you laugh. I can see it’s not working. Remember learning the quote, ‘The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray?’ Well, Robert Burns wrote that, and it’s sure true of this vacation, isn’t it? In Scottish, the original was.
‘The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!’”
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said. “Our best laid plans did go astray, didn’t they? Even the little things you wanted to do like taking rides to see wildflowers or spending afternoons at the park didn’t work out. God must have had a reason for allowing this week to happen. But hey, we still have seven days left. This is the first time I’ve ever taken two weeks off in a row. Maybe we can still do some of the fun things on our list. And there’s no reason we couldn’t take a day trip or two is there? Where would you like to go?”
“Muskegon to the channel to watch the boats! Where would you like to go?”
They spent the next few minutes making happy plans. The angels either laughed or cried.
Jeremy yawned. “You getting sleepy?”
“My body is but not my brain. I just thought of another quote.”
“Apparently your mouth isn’t sleepy yet either.” He chuckled. She ignored him.
“A pessimist was miserable, so an optimist told him to cheer up. What do you think happened?”
Jeremy was snoring. Julie poked him. “Jeremy!”
“What?”
“We didn’t listen to our Scripture Proverb yet! You can’t go to sleep. Did you hear what I asked you?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Listen this time. A pessimist was as miserable as he’d ever been when an optimist told him to cheer up because things could be worse. So, he cheered up! And sure enough, things got worse!”
“You and your quotes!”
But they both laughed. And they smiled as they listened to the Proverb and fell asleep dreaming of next week. Little did they guess that the next week would leave them with no transportation and with Jeremy in bed with back pain.
The two-week vacation was one for the record books alright, but Jeremy and Julie enjoyed it anyway. They counted their many blessings and thanked God. They thought of people they knew who’d give anything to spend a similar non-vacation with a loved one now in heaven. It would be heaven on earth for them just to wake up together one more time. And Jeremy and Julie tried to make each other laugh.
On the last night of vacation Julie wanted to wake Jeremy and tell him something, but his back hurt so much she didn’t have the heart to disturb him. Their shared laughter could wait until morning. She whispered it so she’d hopefully remember it tomorrow. “What mouse was a Roman emperor? Julius Cheeser.”
The end.
***
These blogs are now available in book form on Amazon:
Backroad Ramblings Volume One: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
Backroad Ramblings Volume Two: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
Backroad Ramblings Volume Three: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
Backroad Ramblings Volume Four: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter
