Our main shipment of household goods has been gone for two weeks now. We are still in our bunker, but the walls are bare and the closets, drawers, and cabinets are largely empty.  We have loaner furniture to sit, eat, and sleep on. We have five weeks left to finish things, including selling both our cars, dismantling our fence, and surviving the last weeks of school and rainy season. We really have all we need.

Don’t ask my kids though. According to them, we are one wifi outage away from primitive cave dwelling.

We most notice the gap in the kitchen, where I apparently did not count things out in proper quantities before shipping our stuff. As a result, to feed our family of six daily, we have eleven salad plates, five bowls, four mugs, and four glasses of various sizes (There are also two glass olive jars, but no one will drink out of them). Many afternoons, I see a despondent teen standing in kitchen, staring in horror at a sink of five dirty bowls (usually with dried-cementlike cereal or oatmeal coating them) and hear the lament,

“Why are there no bowls? What am I supposed to do? Mom, there are NO BOWLS!”

The first couple days I responded aloud in hashtags:

“Hashtag first world problems.”  “Hashtag wash a bowl save a life.”  “Hashtag stop eating out of the bowls and they won’t be dirty.” “Hashtag rinse your bowls and they won’t be so hard to clean.”  (Yes, I know this is not the correct way to WRITE hashtags, but I was speaking them, and Chicago’s Style manual has not yet covered the proper way to record this. Or maybe they have, but I’m too busy right now to look it up.)

They thought I was hilarious, but they did not want to encourage me with even cracking a smile.

Then I switched tactics and responded with a philosophic treatise on the benefits of living with less and the rewards of personal responsibility. They were not amused. Someone may have stated, “Washing bowls all day will not make me a better person.” To which I responded, “It certainly won’t hurt! Let’s give it a try!” Have you ever been on the receiving end of an eye-rolling convention? Stop by anytime between the hours of three and five– it’s quite a show.

I finally pulled Thoreau on them and now when they whine, I merely shout, “This is Walden Pond, people! Walden Pond! Embrace it!”

They are still not amused, but it makes me laugh every time. #winning They’d probably appreciate your prayers– it is not easy living with an English teacher, especially when there are no bowls.

And yes Mom, I broke down and bought some paper ones to bridge the gap and slow the protests.