62. Love Is. . . Sparking Snapping Fingers

Planning a 3-week 16-state road-trip adventure!

Owleigh

When I was a kid, my brothers and I spent the days leading up to going on family vacation tip-toeing around our mother. AKA - avoiding her at all costs.

While family vacations are meant to be relaxing, for the mom in the family, planning for vacation is quite possibly the most stressful time of life.

When Mom was stressed she would run from room to room in short spurts, while snapping her fingers. And the house would shake. She wouldn’t yell. She wouldn’t bark orders at us. She’d just dart from the kitchen to the living room, or up the stairs to the hallway, a burst of 10-20 steps, snapping her fingers multiple times. It was like her anger had built up and it would burst out of her through her fingers.

As one who sees auras, I kid you not, her fingers sparked when she did this. It was scary. So scary that I would hide in my closet with a flashlight and read Stephen King books to self-soothe until Mom calmed down. At 13, when I read Stephen King’s FireStarter I wondered if my mother could focus her snapping fingers and become pyrokinetic.

To this day, the sound of snapping fingers is a trigger for me.
And. . . I am my mother’s daughter.

Today, I feel myself wanting to run and snap my fingers and start tiny little fires everywhere!

You see, tomorrow Hobbit and I head out on a 3-week working roadtrip. We’ll be driving to the east coast, stopping to meet various Substack friends IRL along the way, and visiting friends and family we haven’t seen in 8+ years.

I’ve spent the last weeks in vacation planning mode, and not in the fun way. From the household front, that means organizing dog-sitting, coordinating neighbors to watch our house, strategically planning meals so that food is used up before we go, mapping the trip, communicating destinations and arrival/departure times, scheduling visits, charting drive times, booking hotels, etc.

Because I run my own business, the pre-vacation planning mode for work is overwhelming, to say the least. I pre-wrote and scheduled a month’s worth of articles for four publications. I trained a virtual assistant to manage my social media posting schedule. I took extra meetings with my collaboration partners to get ahead of tasks. As I’ll be teaching a workshop and offering a number of private consults, I needed to write lesson plans, create marketing materials, and sign and deliver contracts. The most daunting task of all, coordinating the logistics of a 15-state tour to align with the meetings and work-times for both my business and Hobbit’s.

Just typing all this out, I’m exhausted.

And all I can think about is that our neighbor’s tree branches are resting on our electrical wires and need to be trimmed before we leave because the demon inside my brain concocts these ugly images and complex scenarios of thunderstorms (or overly playful squirrels) weighing down the branches until the wires snap and us coming home to a burnt up house.

I don’t snap my fingers, ever, but right now I can understand why my mom’s fingers sparked more in the days leading up to going on vacation.

I see these social media reels where the wife rolls her eyes as her man-child husband makes comments that things like laundry, dishes, pantry stocking, garbage emptying, etc. “magickally get done” if he just leaves them in a certain place or state. I giggle at these videos because that used to be my life in my first marriage.

And, it isn’t anymore.

Here in the Mirth House, that magick goes both ways.

Hobbit knows and trusts that all the behind-the-scenes things that need to be done get magickally coordinated so that our trip falls together seamlessly. And, I know that having mentioned the tree branches on the wires, they will get trimmed before we go, as if I snapped my fingers and made it happen. . . no trigger pyrokinetic snapping fingers necessary.

Hobbit

Owly possesses advanced skills of noticing things.

When a chair isn’t fully pushed in, she notices.

When a soup bowl goes missing, she harumphs.

When one of our spoons that I bought at a thrift store turns out to be actual sterling silver, she appreciates it. (All of our spoons look silver to me.)

Her brain is wired to notice details. When she sees a unique car on the road, it turns out to be a new species of car, a Genesis. Saturn, Toyota, Rav4—they all blend.

It would take time before I’d have considered the branches rubbing against our power line to require a response.

But—these chafing details rub against the “branches” in Owly’s brain.

Even though I make fun sometimes, I love love love how her beautiful brain works and how the ultraviolet kaleidoscopic minutiae of the world are visible to her.

The fact that her ability to see complexity coexists with my desire for utter simplicity—that our polar opposite personalities can hold each other in relationship—is miraculous.

. . . . . .

I don’t say this out loud enough, but I trust how she sees the world. Sometimes more than I trust myself.

I trust how her mind catches what mine filters out. When she says something needs doing, it darn tooting does. I will definitely dippity doo down those disagreeable branches.

Over time, Owly has let me pack the cooler—because I care about ice. I’ve figured out how to load the car in a way that’s nearly human. I’ll even organize the snacks real nice like so the precious chocolate stuff is accessible.

I’m learning.

When the moment comes for us to vamoose, the long checklist of tasks didn’t need to be written out and assigned. You might say that the bark of our branches of trust has grown. You might say this—dare to say it maybe—just to see what happens when you make that fateful decision to go out on that limb.