Off the Roll

Hindsight, cliche that it is, is still always 20/20.  Nothing is extremely wrong today, although nothing is extremely perfect.  The girls are gone to Pittsburgh for the weekend.  In a rental car.  I get to worry about them but I also don't have to listen to them for three days.  That's some trade off. 
The poet Dorianne Laux has a line of poetry about her daughter that says something like when she is older, I don't know if I can "trust into the future that much."  I trust in our eternal future, but in this world, not so much.  They could meet a psychopath, a sociopath, a necrophiliac, a con man, a bad storm, well.  You get the idea.
But at least it is quiet here right now.
And it took over an hour at Enterprise to get the car.  I love my daughters, but they eat up so much of my time.  Between that and maintaining a home, shopping, even with their growing contributions of chores and couponing, a part of me thinks wow, I could do so much if I lived in a small apartment by myself.  Another writer, Molly Giles, one of my professors in Arkansas, told all of us female students that each child we have is at least two books we will not write.
Only two? 
I guess it depends on how fast you write, which if you are reading this, you know for me it's pretty darn snappy.  So I figure two girls puts me about ten books short.  And as soon as they leave my nest, I'll be so old I won't want to do a lot of things I might have done at 30.
Kimberly will tell me sometimes when I say she has to contribute to doing chores, et al, that I had her and she didn't ask to be born.  All kids say that at some point I think.  I said it to my mother.  But if we appreciate life, then we appreciate that we have responsibilities to sustain our own lives at least, and take some of that weight off our parents' shoulders.
I started working when I was 12 at the local drug store as a soda jerk, what we were called in the 70's.  I mowed lawns a lot too, worked at the grocery store and the Pizza Hut, and paid a lot of my own way and all my own after I turned 18.  I've been the provider for 30 years.  Is it wrong to want a little break? 
My mother told me the last time we had an argument that I had nothing to show for myself, that I had never owned a house, my car is an economy Ford with dents, and my dishes don't even come in complete sets.  I have never aspired to a china hutch filled with a bunch of stuff to dust or use once a year to impress the Circuit Overseer. 
In fact, it has been my experience that circuit overseers will eat my coconut cream pie on paper plates if necessary.
Now, I would like to go live on an island and own just the necessities.  I would like to spend my time preaching, teaching, and writing and just living on fruit and sandwiches and never cooking again.  Cleaning once a week a swipe and wipe.  I do not want to be weighed down.  I wrote that first as weighted down.  Now I think both weighed and weighted down.
But I cried when the girls pulled out of the driveway.  Then I came inside and realized that I intend to shampoo the carpets while they are shopping at the mall, and I got over it.