Upon returning from vacation, while my wife and children gently settle in to our lovely little house, I begin to rapidly swirl through the property, following a predictable progression from unpacking to small projects to finally finding something to bang my head against and become extremely frustrated and then despondent.

Vacation provides a much-needed break from the rigors of daily life, which steadily drag me down and drive me to seek relief in beers and cigarettes at the end of the day when the children are finally in bed and the kitchen is clean once more.  On vacation, we often choose to leave our pouch of tobacco at home, and rarely miss it while we’re away, and tend to go to bed early and gradually build up momentum of solid sleeps and daydreaming about which direction to steer our lives, so that when we return I’m invigorated and ready to take life by the horns.

Our house always feels bigger than I remember it, and our neighborhood more lovely.  Yesterday, after returning from a beautiful weekend in New Hampshire, I stood in the driveway watching yellow leaves drift through the air and the sunlight on the furrows of brush-hogged grass on the hillside, and thought “this ain’t so bad”.  I unpacked the car with perfect efficiency, carrying items to the garage on my return trips, and soon had it emptied and closed the hatch and rolled the big suitcase into our bedroom for later (I’ve never once gone so far as to unpack the actual suitcase the day we get home).  While standing behind our boy so he could play in his favorite upper cabinet, I began shaking a spray foam gun and eyeing the gaps around the drywall in the laundry room that I’ve been meaning to seal for seven years.  Soon I was at work, filling gaps, moving the step stool while our boy clambered up from behind, holding the gun at the perfect angle and letting out just the right amount of foam.  I finished the laundry room and immediately remembered the new exhaust duct in the kitchen, slid the stool to the corner cabinet and got right to work, emptying the top shelf of the lazy susan with one hand while shaking the can with the other.  Access to the back side of the duct was blocked by the top shelf; not to be denied, I left the baby standing on the top step of the stool and calmly strode to the basement stairwell and grabbed the large flathead screwdriver I knew lived in the bottom of my household toolkit.  I lowered the top shelf, foamed some more, and again was denied access—this time by the central rod of the contraption.  Without a word of frustration, I calmly noted the philips heads of the screws anchoring the assembly to the cabinet ceiling, and returned to my toolkit for the drill, already equipped with a philips bit.  Down came the tiny screws and in went my foam gun again; I stood with one foot on the counter, hunched over and stretched out at the same time, depressing the trigger to pump expanding foam into the unseen gap behind the duct.  My son called for miscellaneous items on the counter before him, and without letting off the trigger I reached down and shoved spice jars and spatulas into his reach.  I was a man possessed.  I made three important phone calls in a row.  I delivered my Mom’s groceries, separated from our cooler, to her apartment upstairs.  I screwed on two final slats to the railing ‘round the platform of our newly-acquired play structure.  Is there nothing I couldn’t check off the list?

Finished with the foam, the can itself empty, I took it to the garage to service the gun, which was encrusted with cured foam from a faulty valve on the head of the can that had exploded when touched by the gun’s screw cap.  I laid out a sheet of cardboard on the garage floor and donned a pair of rubber gloves, then doused the assembly thoroughly with foam gun cleaner spray.  I picked at the cured foam with a plastic spoon and then a random steak knife that lives in the pen cup on the workbench, but every time I went to unscrew the gun from the can, the top of the can spun too, fused to the gun.  More spray, more hacking, more useless spinning.  I felt the cold sting of the solvent through my flimsy gloves and went for a rag.  I grabbed large channel-lock pliers and a massive crescent wrench from my metal toolbox, and applied them to the can.  Unable to get proper purchase on the plastic cap of the canister, the whole top spun together.  Frustration began to mount within me.  I sprayed more, hacked more, tried again to get a grip.  I began to curse.  “You pig”, I said.  “You fucking pig”.  I thought about how my voice might carry from the closed doors of the barn, continued my struggle, and continued to curse.  The weighty crescent wrench tempted me to smash the can, but I considered the risk of a pressurized vessel and held back.  But I laid into it with my words.  Frustration turned to despair.  “This is why I smoke”, I said.  “Because I have to deal with this fucking shit”.  “You fucking pig”, I said again.  I again resisted the urge to bring my wrench down on the can of foam, and stood and smashed instead the melamine sheet table on a pair of sawhorses, leaving a good dent.  I threw the wrench back in the box and stormed out of the garage, feeling the entire balloon of my positivity come down around me and our little .3 acre lot.

Once again, as I always do, I’d found a reason to be completely frustrated and fully reminded of why life is hard.  As usual, it was an inanimate object obeying the laws of physics that stubbornly resisted my will.  Typically, it was something related to this ancient house or some chore of Vermont living that I resent.  Some tiresome task that falls to me as a matter of maintaining our lives here.  When I’m retired and living in a pristine condo in Arizona, what will I find to burst my bubble of vacation optimism?