The Creative Nest

Quick question, and I need you to actually sit with it even though you're probably holding a sandwich: when you picture yourself at eighty-something, what's there? Don't be shy. Nobody's grading this. I'll go first, since I clearly have no dignity left to protect. When I picture myself at eighty, I see a woman with strong opinions about a checkout clerk's hair. Not loud opinions. Worse — quiet ones, saved up and delivered later to whoever's stuck in the passenger seat. Did you see that girl's bangs. They were doing two different things. Here's the thing I keep chewing on. I assume I'll mellow. That somewhere around seventy-two a draft will get through a window and blow the hard edges off me. But I've met older women who did not mellow, and honestly they seemed fine with it. There's a woman at my grocery store who wears a visor indoors and critiques the melons out loud. She isn't cruel. She's just... unmonitored. I think that...

Look, I need to ask you something. Do you think dogs should sleep in the bed with their owners? Before you answer, I should tell you that I absolutely think they should. In fact, I was so committed to this belief that I went ahead and bought my dog a set of pet stairs. Not because I was being fancy, but because the dog in question is a thirteen year old sausage of pure muscle with legs the length of a soup can. One day I watched her try to leap onto my bed and it looked less like a graceful jump and more like a bowling ball trying to clear a curb. So, out of pure self preservation for both of us, I bought these stupid little carpeted steps and plopped them next to my bed. Oh boy. What a choice that was. I thought I was setting up a nice little system. She'd trot up, hop in, and we'd both snuggle into the kind of peaceful sleep people write about in those calendars with puppies on them. I did not, not once, consider that I had just installed a dog escalator with no off switch...

I sent an email at 9:14 on a Tuesday. Short. Two questions, both of them answerable in a sentence. I got a reply at 4:47 that began with *Hi*, and then told me about a meeting that happened in March. Not a long reply. It wasn't that kind of dodge. It was maybe four sentences, all about budget cycles and timelines, and not one word about either of my questions. I read it twice to be sure I'd understood. I had. The questions were simply gone, replaced by something adjacent and cheerful. So I wrote back. I said, politely, just circling on my two questions below, pasted them again underneath like an offering. She replied Thursday. This time she said *sorry for the delay* and then told me the timeline she thought we were on. Which was a timeline. From someone else. On a different project. I have now sent four emails. Each one shorter than the last, not because I have less to say but because the length of the thing is what's wearing me down. Number four was basically a subject li...