The Gatorade Reality Check

The Gatorade was officially called “Wild Berry,” but it was a gorgeous, most unberry-like deep azure blue. Like a swath of the Caribbean staring back at you from a glossy travel poster beckoning you in the dead of winter to warmer climes with powdery white sand beaches, and fruity drinks with little umbrellas, and, just maybe, a cabana boy or two to ogle. Or like those “blue raspberry” popsicles with the two sticks you bought at the corner store when you were a kid, hoping that you could slurp them down on a steaming summer day before they melted and dripped blue stains all over your clothes.

Yes, the Gatorade was pretty under any other circumstances, but it was now pooling in the middle of a Laura Ashley bedspread, and a friend of my son’s who had just spilled it entirely by accident in the room she was bunking in was sheepishly repeating “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry about this!” as I kicked into emergency mode and ripped the covers off the bed. She was mortified, and I was scrambling, and my biggest priority at that exact instant was to keep this deluge of vivid blue from soaking through to the mattress. I made it by a whisker. “Is there anything I can do,” she continued, “I’m so sorry, I’ve got another comforter along, I’m so sorry!”

I told her not to worry, and the kids soon left to go out to dinner as planned. They threw the bedding into the back of my car for me, and I followed with a bottle of detergent and several bucks worth of quarters on my way to the Laundromat in town. And on the way there, in the cold and the dark, I reminded myself of what was really important in life and why I didn’t really give a rip about whether the very pretty comforter set was ruined. It had already done what it needed to do.

I’m not a person whose house has many luxury touches. My kitchen cabinets are the same particle board with plastic veneer that I moved my pots and pans into twenty four years ago when we first built. Half the carpeting has been replaced—but the other half is still the original stuff, and shows every day of its age. The living room hasn’t been painted in about fifteen years. But one day about six months ago, I felt the need to buy a twin-sized Laura Ashley comforter and sheet set on the spot and bring it home. It’s gorgeous. The comforter is a rich seafoam green and cream brocade, far too plump to ever fit in my own washing machine, ruched and quilted and heavy and… well… comforting. The sheets I bought to go with are light shell pink, showered with pink cabbage roses in various stages of bloom and dark green leaves evoking the carefree, mythic abandon of Marie Antionette playing shepherdess at Versailles. And I bought them because my daughter had cancer.

She’s completely, thankfully fine now, but life can change in a heartbeat. All of ours had about a month earlier, when she called to say that she had been unexpectedly diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Ten days before that I’d been sitting on a bar stool in a very crowded yuppie bar in the Twin Cities after midnight, a buzz on from the drinks had earlier in the evening, buying for both my daughters and celebrating the older one’s graduation from law school the next day. We felt like we had the world by the tail. Less than two weeks later, I was getting ready to leave my office, peeling out of my spike heels, showing off pictures of the graduation ceremony to a friend in uniform, when my ex-husband called to tell me that my “training baby” had cancer. Bam, we entered a new universe.

A frenzy of shock and concern and activity followed, as doctors were auditioned and surgery was scheduled and insurance was navigated. Work was rescheduled and plans were made to travel to the hospital and stay as long as any of us were needed. But before that, I hastily pulled together a graduation party for her (law school) and her younger brother (high school) on the only weekend before the surgery that we could all get together as a family. And if she was coming home, she was going to need a place to settle in for a few days.

This was no small task. She’d lived away from home for most of the past seven years, in the state next door throughout her undergraduate degree and then during law school. Over the past year I’d turned her tiny bedroom—large enough for a desk and a dresser and a twin bed but nothing bigger—into a storage closet after the divorce as I dug out the master bedroom, repainted, hung lace curtains, reorganized. It took me three days to just get the extra stuff out of her room, move it temporarily back into mine, and dust and vacuum the room from top to bottom. And handle a last-minute felony drunk-driving trial as well.

And then I went shopping. It wasn’t a rational, planned, shop-the-sales-and-just-be-practical kind of trip. It was a visceral, instinctive, primordial drive fueled by the thought that my baby was in trouble, and she needed a soft nest to land in. And Laura Ashley was just the thing. The room looked stunning when I got done, far nicer than when she’d ever lived at home.

We spent the next three days squeezing in as much togetherness as we could. We went to dinner, we went shoe shopping, we had the graduation party complete with a festive cake from the best bakery in town, we ate burgers and onion rings and sundaes outdoors at the local custard stand. I baked banana muffins, made coffee, got out fresh towels, hovered. She slept in late all three days, burrowed into those pretty flowered sheets and brocade coverlet. And then, at the end of the weekend, she went back to the Twin Cities to get the rest of her work and surgery arrangements in order, and I finally sat down and let myself fall apart for a little while.

The Laura Ashley set is now back on the bed, all traces of Gatorade washed down the drain at the Laundromat, ready for the next houseguest. I was quite surprised. I thought that Caribbean ocean blue was set for the long haul, just another small reminder that life never goes smoothly, and if you expect that it will, boy are you in for some rude awakenings.

But if it had, you know why I wouldn’t have blinked an eye.