Welcome back into our home, family and friends! How we’ve missed having you inside the house with us. Before you enter, though, we thought we’d let you know about a few changes around here.
We have stopped vacuuming. We’ve fallen in love with the feel of dog hair on our arms and in our ears and noses. It’s both tickly and a protective coating in case of a fire, which is especially helpful since we haven’t replaced batteries in anything for two years, including the smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms.
We’ve stopped turning on lights because they hurt our eyes, which is also why we now wear sunglasses inside and outside, but only outside if it’s raining. Please don’t mention the length of anyone’s toenails, hair, or dreams about how to mask dolphins. We also now randomly scream into pillows.
We’ve given the dining room over to the dogs, and instead eat dinner at the coffee table—which we’ve moved into the hall—in front of whatever the newest competitive-baking show is on whoever’s iPad is the most charged. Though when I say “hall,” I mean bathroom. We’ve also replaced all of our missing Tupperware lids with pickleball paddles, and the missing pickleball paddles with stale loaves of sourdough.
We eat unpaid bills for breakfast and lunch, off the cutting board on the kitchen counter. Dinner is usually screams with a hearty side of curses.
If you’re wondering whether we’re wearing the same outfits as in those pictures which we texted you two months ago, you are correct! We don’t believe in laundry anymore and, truthfully, rarely wear clothes. The pile of single socks in the bathroom? Toilet paper!
We’ve stopped checking expiration dates on all foods because if we’re fine, they’re fine. We also only whisper now unless we’re humming Cardi B.
Our living room looks like the kind of low-tide situation that sends fiddler crabs running for their lives and smells like a Kiss concert at 2 A.M. Though when I say “living room,” I mean our bedroom. And when I say “our bedroom,” I mean the compost pile behind the garbage shed where we’ve pitched a moldy tent.
Our Internet is spotty because we haven’t paid the bills in a few months (as I previously mentioned, we ate them), but you can totally wander aimlessly down the road until something dings somewhere, like despair.
We’ve taken to family napping, so if you arrive and we don’t immediately answer the door, the chipmunks who live in the sinkhole on the porch will happily accept peanuts from your lap, so please bring peanuts.
The kids now sleep in the closet. Though when I say “closet,” I mean our haunted, fieldstone eighteenth-century basement. They prefer to be greeted like this: “Hello, People-Cats, how do you doo-doo?” with just a wee curtsy and no eye contact ever.
Please don’t open any cupboards or closets or go into any rooms other than the bathroom, and only if it’s a potentially embarrassing emergency and you’re wearing white pants. Otherwise, there are diapers in the garage. Please introduce yourselves to the raccoon family in there—Blanche, Toby, Sincere, Rabies, and Dog Mom are awesome.
We are so thrilled you’re here! But please don’t touch or hug or look at us. Thanks! And yay!
