Our Ghetto Beach House

We made it. Six hours in a car with Lucy, despite organizational dysfunction and a minor tick infestation, we made it to our beach house in Hatteras. The house is optimistically named Absolutely Fabulous, in much the same way as some parents might nickname an effeminate kid, Thor, in the vane hope that a mere name might somehow endow the recipient with qualities that are otherwise lacking. To name this particular house, Absolutely Fabulous is to forever strip any reasonable meaning from those two words.

It is not without its benefits. The roof seems to work. Electricity is fully functioning, as is the indoor plumbing. There are no broken windows. No roaches, rats or other pests have made an appearance, and the kitchen seems to be fully functioning. Thus ends its positive qualities.

The negative side of the ledger must begin with the smell of the place. The first floor game room has that stale, film of mustiness most often associated with Southern Baptist fellowship halls. It's as if someone years ago had an Easter egg hunt using moth balls. As you venture up the stairs on the carpeted steps, which appear not to have been vacuumed since the Eisenhower administration, the smell changes. The second floor has four bedrooms dissected  by a single hallway. The air is thick with disinfectant, the kind that motels spray after four college kids check out of their Spring Break room at Motel Six. By the time you reach the third floor living space and kitchen, the smell becomes less noticeable, not offensive, but with a 1950's, Green Mile staleness that makes you want to throw open every dirty window in the place and let in some fresh air. Speaking of dirt, there's lots of it here at Absolutely Fabulous. I am hoping and praying that none of the ladies happen to look up at the blades of the ceiling fan above me...there's enough dirt lining those babies to plant tomatoes.

But, I have no business complaining. I'm on vacation, and my son and his girlfriend are four hours away, having left from Nashville at 10:00 last night, driving through the night. I will have an entire week to be charmed by the hidden beauty of Absoluetly Fabulous. After all, when you pay $7000 for a house at the beach, there has to be hidden beauty, right? Oh wait...Christina just found an ant!