Dahlia Dualander (Dollie to her friends) has a happy life. Her happiness, though, is not without its price.

With a house in the country, an apartment in the city, and a fishing shack up-river, Dollie’s family is stretched thin. So is her linen closet and her pantry, and, as you can imagine, her wallet. But this doesn’t stop Dollie from enjoying life. She is filled with optimism from morning to night.

Dollie and her husband share the household duties. Her husband takes care of garbage and paper products. These are not always located where they ought to be, but there is always a large supply of both.

A twenty-four-roll block of toilet paper is hard for Hubby to pass up at the local All-Mart. He remembers all too well having been stuck up-shack with no one to hear his pleas for paper. From that day on, he can’t leave a mart without rolls in his cart. The challenge remains to get them evenly distributed among the family’s seven bathrooms.

Dollie is in charge of everything else, especially parenting, on which she prides herself.

One day, Son was hosting a Matrix party in the city while Hubby was chasing shad up-river. The Dualander’s young daughter, having petitioned the family court for adoption by the family of her best friend, was happily ensconced with her surrogate family. (The court was considering her application, and legal fees were piling up. Luckily, their lawyer takes credit cards, which Dollie has amassed in every variety.) Dollie was taking this in her stride, recognizing her daughter’s adolescent need to rebel. Free to pursue her own artistic urges, Dollie was painting watercolors of the lake at their country house.

Ever since Dollie’s friend, Jody, opened a take-out shop in the village, Dollie hasn’t cooked many meals. She finds it saps her creative energy. Her signature chutney, though, is another story. Dollie makes vats of the stuff each August to give away at the holidays. But with three households, it is sometimes hard to keep track of the most mundane objects, let alone the arcane accoutrements of her family’s hobbies.

Fishing tackle finds its way back to the city when Son decides to clear the van for a music video shoot; Dollie’s canning spices end up at the shack instead of the lake house where she cans. (The village market has yet to order coriander seed, despite Dollie’s pleas.) One year, a bushel of peaches rotted in the back of the Jeep, leaving it full of the sickly-sweet smell of fruit liquor forevermore. The mass of fruit flies Dollie encountered in the garage that Labor Day were almost gone by Christmas. The chutney was a little thin that year.

As Dollie painted, a large canoe floated into view. In it, a family of four, plus a miniature Schnauzer with a lace collar, chattered happily, eating sandwiches from a large picnic basket. Suddenly, Dollie felt a pang of loneliness. The lake house was supposed to be their family’s retreat from the stress of the city, a place to gather together for Scrabble games by the fire and barbeques on the lawn. What went wrong, thought Dollie?

In their pursuit of family values, her family had been rent asunder. Dollie resolved, then and there, to retrieve her vision of familial bliss. But how, she wondered? 

As Dollie pondered, her arthritic neck began to ache and stiffen. Dollie set down her brushes and flipped through a Home Improvement catalog that lay nearby. In it, she found her answer: a family of four, minus the Schnauzer, was pictured floating in a cloud of steam in their new hot tub. Dollie could picture her children’s faces in place of the smiling catalog models. Not even her sullen daughter could resist the temptation of hot tubbing, she thought. The price was steep, but what price happiness, thought Dollie?

(Dahlia Dualander is a fictitious character; any resemblance to anyone you know is purely coincidental. Stay tuned to this space for further news on her continuing adventures.)