It’s prom season and on Saturday young couples in Boomtown spent the day dressing up, pinning on corsages, posing for photographs in front of the mantle, eating a fancy dinner, laughing and dancing the night away.
In honor of the season and happy memories, I’d like to take this moment to cue up a flashback:
Yes. There we are back in the year 2000, back before Garth Brooks retired, before bedazzled flip-flops were cool, every teenager on the planet owned a data plan and before I knew what I was getting myself into.
If only we could have seen into the future.
If only someone would have warned us that thirteen years later these gangly, innocent, teenagers who single-handedly kept Suave hair gel on the shelves and were so convinced they were in love would find themselves un-showered and un-filtered, wearing overalls and saggy work jeans, crammed ass to ass in an unfinished bathroom in an almost finished house arguing about what iPod mix to listen to while in the middle of another argument about how someone is hovering and someone else doesn’t understand the importance of cleaning the mortar off the trowel between tiling projects.
Thirteen years ago the plan would have been to get a job where you make enough money to hire someone to tile the damn bathroom.
Thirteen years ago we would have been listening to Garth Brooks and there would be no argument.
Thirteen years ago we would have been pretty excited about the whole iPod thing.
If only we would’ve known. Perhaps we could have avoided this situation all together. I could have suggested that my future husband, the one standing so coiffed, cute and confident next to that girl in the bedazzled flip-flops, just go ahead and become a trapper/mountain man like he dreamed of as a boy and I would just go on to marry a man who wears khakis and doesn’t own a table saw or a wet saw or a hand saw or any other kind of saw that would give him the idea that maybe, perhaps, he should build an entire bathroom from scratch, and then spend a good three to four days with his dearly beloved tiling the damn thing, from floor to ceiling.
I would have missed that mountain man, but as I pick the mortar from under my fingernails and behind my ears, I think maybe I could have gotten used to the khakis.
Why manicures don’t work on me…
I mean, did you know endless hours of mixing mortar, scraping it on the walls, cleaning it from the floors, accidentally splashing it into your eyeball and spraining your wrist while operating the high powered drill necessary to mix the stuff can turn you into the worst possible version of yourself?
Did you know that you can sprain your wrist operating a drill?
Me neither. But it’s true.
Turns out that forty-thousand trips up and down two flights of stairs to get to the wet saw does something weird to your right butt cheek too.
It’s true.
Just ask Husband.
Oh, now you might be thinking to yourself ,”Well, a couple that can survive building a house together can survive anything.” And the two of us might agree, but only under the condition that the house doesn’t have a single tile in it.
Because tiling sucks. It is hard and it is messy and it makes perfectly sweet and well-intentioned wives really mouthy and equally well-intentioned husbands really annoying.
And that, I fear, might be the only thing my dear husband and I agree on when it comes to the project that consumed our weekend.
But oh, I love this man, I do.
I love that he is capable and handy and looks good in those overalls. But our lives would be so much easier if he would just let me pick the soundtrack for the project.
And if he would stop with the suggestions on how I should hold the trowel, even if it might help me avoid getting so much mortar on my pants that not even tightening my belt can save him from the sight of my plumber’s crack.
I don’t need his suggestions. I mean, doesn’t twenty straight minutes of tiling make me an expert?
And don’t you think when your wife screams out in agony, drops the drill, grabs her wrist and falls to the floor that a husband should come running to her side and ask her what’s wrong instead of calmly assuming she’s overreacting to another injury, waiting for her wails to turn to whimpers before asking her sarcastically if she needs to go to the hospital?
I mean, that like, really hurt.
I’m ok. It’s fine. But still.
Somehow I don’t think Sunday morning motivational home construction pep talks that include promises of foot rubs, negotiations on who will make the coffee and a vow not to get pissy with one another today is the future prom-goers in Boomtown imagined as they walked arm in arm with their dates at the grand march last Saturday.
But maybe it should be. I mean, if I have to tile a bathroom at least it’s a result of my own brilliant idea that our bathroom be covered in tiles.
And at least I get to do it with a man who’s willing to do what it takes to give me everything I want, even if it means spraining his right butt cheek from forty-seven thousand trips to the basement while putting up with the whining coming from his wife and the music on her iPod mix.
And if I have to tile a bathroom at least I get to do it with a boy who took me on a date to Bonanza when I had purple rubber bands on my braces and still thought I was presentable enough to pass as a prom date.
Which proves he has just the right amounts of delusion and optimism to survive a tiling project and, consequently, a marriage to me.
At least I hope so. I guess we’re not quite done yet…maybe it wouldn’t hurt to compromise a bit on the music selection…
Oh the price you pay for a pretty place to pee.
Photo by Sylvia in the Philippines from
Photo by Harriet in the Faroe Islands @ 
and left-over flowers,
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 