What Husbands Do When Wives Leave Town

Life in the Boomer Lane’s children all live in remote places, like London and Seattle and Charleston. Sometimes LBL likes to visit them solo. It’s a different kind of bonding than if Now Husband were with her. And LBL’s friends Jean and Joyce are both on Anna Maria Island in Florida. That can be another NH-free trip.

Whenever LBL  goes out of town for more than a few days, NH engages in sneaky, subversive activity that he doesn’t discuss with LBL before she leaves. This has nothing to do with women, drugs, gambling, or the current oil spill. But it does involve doing something that she couldn’t have imagined him doing.

On each of her last two trips to see one or another of her kids, she returned to find out that NH had purchased a trailer (i.e.: “mobile home”) in her absence. Both mobile homes are in Florida. One cost about $2000, which he co-purchased with LBL’s friend Jean. LBL isn’t sure where all this interest in trailer/mobile home ownership came about, but NH threw himself into mobile home ownership right up to the point in which the tenant crashed through the floor.

Circumstances could have placed the blame on either party. Luckily, no one did that. But an inspection showed that the entire mobile home floor would have to be replaced at a cost that exceeded the purchase price. After that, NH and Jean called the mobile home park and let them know they were abandoning the trailer/mobile home. The mobile home park didn’t seem to care about that, either. LBL was sort of perplexed about this entire thing, since in her world, the world of DC real estate, people generally threaten to hire attorneys over missing kitchen curtains.

On LBL’s latest trip (London), she returned to find out that NH had sold his sailboat. NH is associated with his sailboat in the same way the Pope is associated with his vestments. Remove it and no one would recognize him (although, unlike the Pope, Dan wouldn’t get arrested for walking around the Vatican naked).

The sailboat means more than sailing to NH. NH spends a lot of time in what LBL calls “fondling his boat.” He repairs, he tweaks, he spits and polishes. He sits and stares at it. There is always something that has to be attended to, especially if it involves obscure boat parts that use words that could win any Scrabble game in the world. NH’s other fun activity is to go onto the sailing blogs and newsgroups and to read every single posting and to offer his own answers and advice to sailors all over the world.

Now the boat is gone. Of course, NH has his reasons. But he announced that he has found a substitute. Specifically, a Westfalia Camper Van. NH tells LBL that owning a camper van will be similar to owning a boat. She has a hard time with this concept. After all, there is the land/water thing, which sort of seems to me to be a serious difference. But if that’s what NH wants, so be it. LBL just wants someone to inspect the floor of whatever he wants to buy. After all, crashing through the floor of a moving camper would be a bit more of a pesky problem than crashing through a stationery trailer in a trailer park.