By July, our family needs to get dirty. We need grubby bare feet, black half-moons under our fingernails, and dreadlocked hair. We need pink cheeks, sand in our bathing suits, and bug-bitten ankles.
It’s because we live in the suburburniest suburb in all of the suburban world. Seriously. Cinco Ranch makes the Simpson’s Springfield look urban edgy. In our Suburban Suburb, the HMO sends citations for grass growing in the sidewalk cracks. Winding concrete trails connect every brick-walled cul de sac to every other brick-walled cul de sac. Kids swim in each other’s backyard pools, then jump out and yell, “Let’s go over to your pool now!” Neighbors meet in the shady neighborhood park to play Red Rover while the moms discuss the nearby elementary school’s PTA politics.
Our suburban suburb is the home to Golden Doodles who wait by their picture windows for their kids to get home from swim team practice. Families deliver hand-me-downs to each other by the minivan full. Everyone has either just returned from Disney or planning their trip. Dads grumble about how their kids want Black Walnut’s six-buck Mac & Cheese for lunch instead of McDonalds.
Kids go to camp in the summer while professionals come to pick up the Lab’s poop, mow the lawns, vacuum the playrooms, and clean the pool. Every singe person is addicted to an iPhone, Mom’s old iPhone, or Dad’s old, old, old iPhone. On Sunday morning, there’s a traffic jam to get to church.
No hating here. The Hergenrader family is DOWN with the suburbs. We love raising our kids with families so much like ours. It’s totally what we signed up for. Eleven and a half months a year, we embrace life in the minivan.
But, like I said, by July, we gotta unplug from our programmed lives.
So, we head to the lake. M’s family has a cabin that’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. No wifi or sidewalks, just a sketchy cell phone signal and a beautiful lake.
We have to drive twenty miles through cornfields and John Deere traffic jams to get Organic Almond Milk. No gyms offering sunrise yoga classes. Or any yoga classes, actually.
But the cabin does offer fantastic fishing. It’s here our kids learn to bait their own hooks, how to tell if a fish is pregnant (a prevalent problem, as it turns out), how to navigate a paddleboat, how to catch a toad, and how to grill up a hobo dinner.
No HOA rules at the lake. Weeds grow around rusty boat trailers. Dogs don’t wear leashes. Or collars. It’s whatever floats your boat—literally since some of these SAME boats have been on the lake for decades.
At the cabin, I spend more time on long walks with the kids and less time at the grocery store (a prevalent problem since we rarely have anything to eat here). I don’t shower. My feet are dirty; my toenail polish is chipped.
M spends less time on business-strategy conference calls and more time on strategies to catch really big catfish. He grows a straggly beard and lets the sun burn his shoulders.
We all sort of stink and we all love feeling SO UNSUBURBAN.
At the cabin we are dirty, grungy, and country.
And it’s exactly what we need.
