Dani's Dirt

I fear how backwoods Okie I am about to sound with the content of this post, but just roll with me here for a bit.

Do you ever have one of those weeks? You know, those weeks where you have an impossible to achieve to-do list ahead of you, the house never seems to stay clean, you begin passing off clothes as ‘clean’ even though you picked them out of the dirty clothes just because you physically haven’t had time to do laundry, and the thing that tips the scale is when your husband comes home and says something along the lines of “what’s for dinner?”

Uhhh yo, dude. Can’t you see I’ve been trying to hold up the world with one finger, while rollerblading backwards through volcanic ash… blindfolded?!?!

This basically describes what my/our entire August was, not that he wasn’t just as busy, because to be honest, other than Sundays I rarely see him in the daylight — between the two of us we were juggling four jobs and trying to get a new farm off the ground.

With all this in mind, I feel it’s fairly understandable that tensions occasionally got tight.

So, as my faithful 11-year-old Pontiac with 250,000 miles needing an oil change and new brakes started making a slightly weird noise and neither of us having a free second to do anything about it — adding one more thing to our stress pile — we decided I would drive My Someone’s big truck until we could address the Pontiac at hand.

I tell My Someone that I first fell in love with his dog, than his truck and then finally him. Actually he falls second on that list — right after his dog — but that’s my secret between you and I. 😉

I really do love his truck though, it’s a Chevy Duramax, while normally I’m a Ford girl, this is my exception. It’s sharp …when it’s clean. Emphasis on those last three words.

Conflicting thoughts aside — whether it be how sharp it is or how dirty it is — that really has not a lot of relevance to what I love about his truck. Actually, I couldn’t even put my own finger on exactly what my draw to it was… that is, until the other day.

It was hot, humid and I was finally leaving my day of working watermelon harvest to head home, I climbed up into the truck and fired it up, the engine came alive and the a/c burst through the vents on max bringing with it a collection of memories that flooded my senses.

No longer was I stressed about life, sitting in a hot truck outside the co-op on the west side of Daviess County, Kentucky, but riding back from the Tulsa State Fair — September 30, 2012 — Yoda sprawled out in the back asleep, My Someone driving and me in the passenger seat, marveling about how at ease I felt talking to this guy I had just met the night before. Convincing myself to not read too much into it, ‘anything more than friendship between you and Yoda’s little brother would never work.’

The memories followed with making out for an hour in the Louisville airport parking lot the first time I visited Kentucky mid-December 2012, enveloping me in that crazed puppy love I-can’t-possibly-keep-my-hands-off-you, the-air-is-sucked-out-of-my-lungs-when-I-look-at-you beginning of our relationship.

And then finally I was transported to January 11, 2014, and once again saturated in that I can’t possibly be happier than I am right now feeling as our wedding coordinator worked to stuff all of my wedding dress into the passenger seat and this really attractive blonde man, with dimples and sporting a new shiny silver band on his left hand, looked at me and said “Hey, guess what? We’re married!”

As the a/c began to work it’s magic in cooling the truck interior, I drifted back to reality and out of memory lane wonderfulness. However, back in my reality, all my fretting towards the things I couldn’t change was gone, replaced by the warmness of my memories and the reminder that I have a pretty awesome teammate to lean on when life gets crazy.

I went to sit my purse on the center console and was greeted by the various ammunition, a roping glove, a turkey beard, a ridiculous amount of pens, a duck call and some small parts to lord knows what type of farm equipment that I’ve seen littering that same spot since that day in September, almost two years ago, when I sat in the passenger seat and chatted easily with a guy I had just met the night before.

It’s not the truck, physically, I’m so crazy in love with, it’s the memories it holds, it’s the clutter on the console that in one little pile completely describes my husband, it’s a diesel powered refuge from life stress.

Awh, to heck with it, I don’t care if the content of this post makes me sound like a backwoods Okie. I love that damn truck.

My husband too.

Do you have something in your life like what I described above? A happy place that makes you remember all kinds of warm and fuzzy memories with your significant other? If so, I want to hear about it in the comments.