ABOUT CHASING LOSSES…

Summers in the deep South are always hot, but throw in family drama and you have the making for an explosion. It was July of 2011 when my husband and I decided to each do a mini vacation with our families. I went to North Carolina with my mother and mawmaw to visit my aunt and cousins, while my husband headed to Gulf Shores with his parents, sister and young nieces. Easy Peasy…

My husband’s family decides that Waterville, a popular water park, is the perfect place to spend the day with 3 little girls who are all under the age of 5. And who can not swim… The plan was to meet at the park for a day of fun in the sun. How bad could it be? There were 3 other adults going…except these adults showed up in denim (it’s literally 100 F) WTH?!? It gets better… of those 3 adults no one brought sunscreen or towels for the girls. My responsible husband sunscreens everyone with his bottle and then proceeds to get life jackets for the girls (because THEY CAN’T SWIM) while the others kick back to read and nap. It’s a struggle in the lazy river… the nieces are tiny and as soon as one little girl is situated in a tube, one of the other girls falls through her tube; as she is rescued, the next niece slips through the inflated ring again… and on and on it goes. 

Meanwhile in Fayetteville, NC I’m watching my aunt tow our boat to dock with a rope and cigarette in her mouth (yeah you read that right).  My uncle had just bought this brand new boat and couldn’t wait to take Mawmaw out fishing. We loaded the gear and made way for a relaxing day on the lake. The water was cool, I was getting my tan on, Mawmaw caught a fish, life was good… until it wasn’t; the boat wouldn’t crank. Always the optimist, my uncle gets the trolling motor and we start a very slow crawl back to the dock. The wind picks up, the temperature drops and the clouds turn navy, the dock is in sight when the trolling motor dies and thunder (next will be heads) starts to roll. My aunt drops an F-bomb (in front of my her 70 year old mother) and cigarette in hand off the boat she goes demanding for a rope. With the rope in her mouth, she proceeds to doggie paddle, towing the boat back to shore, using the F word in ways that’d make a sailor blush… 

That night my husband and I recounted our day’s adventures… while its funny now, in that moment we were seriously wondering how we were born into these families. This leads to a moment of insanity… I get a text a few hours later from my husband saying that he bought two plane tickets for Christmas to Las Vegas.