Weekenders—ugh!

Now that I call my house on the river home, I’m beginning to see what some locals have against weekenders. What nerve! Do they think our lives go into suspended animation from Monday to Friday?

“Would it be too much trouble to drive me to the bus on Monday morning,” they inquire? Sure, it just means a 50-mile round-trip to the least appealing destination in the county and a guaranteed need for a car wash after driving through umpteen road construction sites. I’ll be home by noon. Oh, you want to take the 1:00 bus? Don’t these people have real jobs?

Of course they don’t have real jobs. If they had real jobs they wouldn’t be weekenders. Only people who can amble into the office on Monday afternoon and leave on Friday at 2:00 p.m. can afford to be weekenders. These are not middle managers. These are big-shots. They can’t lose their job because nobody can figure out what it is they do.

And how about the leftovers they foist on us? When I was a weekender, I thought it was nice of me to make an extra dinner serving for our widower neighbor. But now I wonder if he was just tossing it onto the compost pile after I pulled out of the driveway. Another plate of garbage from the weekenders. They give you their over-ripe peaches and dented zucchinis and expect you to mow the lawn in gratitude.

To be fair, weekenders get no respect. They anguish about the existential conflict of owning two homes. “Where do I live?” “Who am I, really?” they mutter as they trespass on your riverfront property with seven Schnoodles tugging at their matching designer leashes.

Weekenders do have a way of making arcane jobs possible for us locals. A friend recently became a pet portraitist and enjoys a booming trade thanks to the likes of those weekender pets. But try to find a hardware store on Main Street anymore. Weekenders buy French-milled soap and art, not toggle bolts and driveway tar.

It seems like I spend my whole week cleaning up and after my weekender family and friends. From pool-tending in summer to patio-sweeping in autumn, my life is focused on the weekend. And you know you’ve switched over to a local when you start to have a yen for a chain-saw to thin out those seedlings in the back acre wood.

Even the local wildlife knows if you’re a weekender. They leave your flora alone just long enough for you to invest the remains of your 401-K in local perennials. Then they swoop in on a Monday and trash the place.

And what’s the big deal about Labor Day? Where does everybody go? One day I can’t get a table at the local eatery and the next week they are closed on Tuesday due to lack of interest. Am I not a person who needs sustenance on a Tuesday afternoon?

Now they want to vote here, too. It’s not enough they have a billionaire mayor—they want to choose our highway superintendent. What will their bosses say when they take off election day Tuesday to vote upstate? Oh, that’s right. They don’t have bosses. They’re weekenders!

I notice that people are nice to you when you’re a weekender. They rarely speak without a smile in their voice. Things change when you turn local. The playing field evens. An untended lawn is par for a weekender—locals are expected to jump on the John Deere every other day to mulch autumn leaves and pick up fallen branches. I hope you didn’t move to the country to relax, Brother, because there’s a load of firewood in the driveway. Stack it, Local, pronto!

- Cass Collins