Maybe If I Consider the Maybes

A year ago, we were still in the trailer, in the campground in Wisconsin, looking for a house to buy. Maybe, if we’d spent less time house-hunting, feeling like the summer was a ticking time bomb, and more time finding a sustainable apartment (or rental house) that wouldn’t suck our souls from our very throats and make me feel desperate to get out, then we would have been renting not just through my search for doctors, but also through my search for diagnoses. through my recovery from that neurology drug addiction and through my recovery from surgery. We would have rented for long enough to see me through to feeling like myself again for the first time in years. Like I do, now. A year after we pulled in to Wisconsin that final time. 

Perhaps, by now, instead of waiting on renovations to this house we bought, we would have taken the money we got from the insurance company after that hail storm in Colorado, and we would have put it down on another Airstream. The second Airstream would have had to have been used, seeing as how the new ones are all made for electric hookups in fancy campgrounds. Tracy still would’ve had to pimp one out for off-grid living like he did our first one, but he would have been wiser. We wouldn’t be in the midst of Covid, trying to get solar panels and lithium batteries. We would know what works for us, because we had years of living in one already.

Maybe the second trailer would have been smaller, so we could fit into older campgrounds designed before RVs out West got so god-dammed big.  Or, maybe not, because a smaller rig would have even further limited our time off-grid because of its smaller waste tanks. We used to be able to go 10 days out in the desert, or in the mountains—or anywhere without people—before we had to hitch back up and go back into the real world. Tracy says he would never go for a composting toilet, but maybe he really would, because that would give us more time. Who knows.  Not me, now, or ever.  

But, whatever, maybe we would have gotten another Airstream and gotten back on the road.

Maybe, if I’d not felt so desperately anxious and depressed that I would resort to ruining my husband’s dream, maybe I would have convinced him somehow to help me with the decision on where to settle down (not knowing then that the anxiety and depression forcing me to make my bad decision could actually be cured with not years of intense therapy but with a month of withdrawal then an hour of surgery). Maybe, had he helped me with the decision, or, if anyone had, I would have realized that I love summer and I hate winter, so moving to a state where there’s more winter than summer is a slap-your-forehead stupid idea. Maybe, if I’d charted where I’d spent four of the past five summers, up north in wet and chilly places, I’d have remembered how at home I feel in the sunshine, barefoot for so long that I get to the grocery store before I realize something’s wrong. Maybe I would have chosen somewhere where it never would be wrong to be barefoot.   

Maybe I would have realized that, even though no one can convince Tracy to do something he’s set against, my enthusiasm and strong desires do get us into a few pinches. Like, buying that first beater trailer, the Frolic, that Tracy had to rebuild from the ancient plumbing up. I did get us into loading two storage units of my sister’s things into a U-Haul, then unloading it all into Tracy’s small house, then loading it in a U-Haul again and unloading it into the hands of a newly widowed antique dealer who was so idiotic with her own grief that she lost track of her accounting and didn’t pay me the value of that farmhouse-full of furniture and lovelies that I needed to pay for Mom’s assisted living.  

Maybe, I would have seen the mistakes I’d made, one after the other while I was in the middle of my own Gone-with-the-Wind-Meets-Who-Shot-JR selfhood drama, that I’d not have made another mistake, like pestering Tracy to buy every house we saw here in Madison until he finally gave in and bought this one, that turns out to need a new chimney so the new roof won’t cave in so the third floor won’t collapse into the second floor that’s being held up only by the chimney that we’re about to hold our breaths as it’s being replaced. All before the first-floor renovation that happens at the exact time my son needs a place to live while he finishes his PhD because this Federal Administration’s war on science has killed his final months of physics funding. Where he will live as he defends his dissertation, who knows. Not with me, because, before renovation to create a guest room large enough for a real bed, there must be a fix to the siding post-Wisconsin hail damage (post-Colorado hail damage) that must come after roof replacement that must be proceeded by chimney repair, which is all just now starting and will not end until next spring, when it will be past Finn‘s time of homelessness during his dissertation defense.  

Maybe Tracy and I would have bought a house that my son could have moved right in to when he predictably lost his research funding.  Or, a house my husband doesn’t hate, that he might feel okay having it be the foundation of the scenario of dying and leaving me alone. That he might feel like I could afford to maintain, even as a little old lady with the same high-cost medical needs of my mother’s addled brain with my sister’s two storage units full of antiques, without a brain-drug addiction.

Maybe, three years ago as soon as I knew something was wrong, maybe had I tried harder to find an endocrinologist instead of relying on an old high-school friend’s frat brother’s little sister to fit me in (she never did), or, maybe if that brain MRI in the temporary wing of the tiny hospital in upstate New York hadn’t freaked me out during the trip to it in the freight elevator when the endocrinologist in south Texas told me I might have a brain tumor, maybe if I hadn’t had to try to find an MRI facility to take my insurance while I was sitting in the passenger seat of the truck during a torrential downpour in the middle of the woods in New York because there was no cell signal in the Airstream and I was worried my brain wasn’t working in the first place and that endocrinologist in central Texas hadn’t been an asinine assaulter of my self esteem and my anxiety and depression weren’t working overtime, maybe I wouldn’t have canceled our entire summer plans to take the Airstream to Newfoundland, thus robbing Tracy of what would have been his final trip of adventuring. The next summer, we went to Colorado, where we were hailed on, and that was that. 

Maybe, if I’d listened to my far-away friends who were worried about me when they could hardly believe how stressed I was throughout our summer up the Pacific Coast Highway, our winter in the best RV resort we could find in South Texas, when I told myself I would hang in there for Tracy to enjoy Alaska, and I enjoyed it too, but was anxious and stressed enough to continue to plot some kind of escape from this lifestyle, to see the Colorado hailstorm (after it happened) as my way out, maybe if I’d listened to my friends, and saw what an unusual wreck of a person I was, not even unusual for me but especially for me, me who had been strong throughout so much struggle my entire life, maybe I would have seen that something was especially strange was wrong, something that could be addressed, something that we could get past. Something that we did get past. Already. In just a year.

Maybe we would have gotten another Airstream and gotten back on the road, and maybe with a recovered brain and renewed sleep I would have enjoyed being a nomad, like I did the first few years, Maybe I would have enjoyed it even more, seeing as how the terror of Covid has passed and we’ve learned so much.

Maybe this tangle of verb tenses and recurring “ifs” and “maybes” all turn into a flattened “it doesn’t matter,” seeing as how my access to the one medicine that now helps me requires my residence to be in Wisconsin (I could not get it in Texas). I’m required here physically, to pick up the med, once a month, with additional in-person appointments with the prescribing physician, here in Wisconsin.

Maybe, I love this weird house we picked under duress with all the floors sloping away from the 100-year-old chimney that’s being taken down tomorrow, as we hold our breath that the rest of the house remains upright. Maybe we’re in one of the many beautiful places I’ve seen over these years of travel, a place covered still with a few tall prairies, in a city that still demands accountability from its elected officials, in a neighborhood where the same prairie flowers and grasses are encouraged to grow instead of mown yards, where people still dry their laundry in their backyards, where I can kayak every Monday because I’m playing ukulele on the other days, where we leave the house in the evenings to walk to eat ice cream made from cows that graze those prairies. Where I can walk the dog safely at 3:00 am under the streetlights as she regrets treating the makeshift kitchen pantry like a buffet. Where I like my neighbors and where, maybe, I’m happy, no matter where I am because I feel a lot better.