The mountains of laundry in our house were starting to avalanche. Since the 1.5 hour trip to town to wash steaming piles of filthy laundry was an inevitable mandate for today, I decided we should offset the chore of it all by incorporating a date for me and my sweet spouse, Blase. In the last 15 months, we’ve had exactly 4 “dates”. Dates, in our world, are child-free time periods during which Blase and I are together. These time periods can range anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours in duration.

There is a babysitter in Arcata who the girls love. Due to her soccer and catering schedule and our prolonged departure routine, our window of dating opportunity would be 1-2 hours today. It required an hour of gathering up the piles of laundry, clubbing the rebellious ants lurking in the dirty kitchen rags, making snack bags filled with rice cakes, nectarines, and almond butter sandwiches and shoving all items into the car just enough so that the trunk would latch. I got up early and made breakfast before the girls awoke so that they could feed, pee, and load in time for us to make our date – with our date.

There is always that only-when-you’re-rushing-to-be-somewhere-and-have-nearly-made-it-out-the-door-after-lots-overcome-obstacles explosive-cataclysmic -diaper -eruption that seems to only happen to us when we are working against a fairly rigid appointment time. Today was no exception. One can never have enough small clean pants for mornings like this one.

Off we rambled, bumping down the road against the backdrop of an irresistably sunny and lush day in the Mattole Valley. Blue sky and sapphire waves meeting almond sand and amethyst lupin were our roadside wonderland. Barely born lambs struggled to move off the road on their new legs as we approached. At one of the narrowest curves on the Wildcat, we wound around to encounter a hulking black bull. Blase slowed the car to go around him and he lunged toward our moving vehicle. The choice between raging bull collision and careening cliff dive in the car is never an easy one. Blase split the difference just enough to narrowly escape disaster in both directions.

We arrived at the babysitter’s house, late but still enthusiastic and stepped around an apparently transient epileptic dog seizing in the entry way. This threat to our rapidly vanishing date time was skirted thanks to the help of a child-less adult who took on the task of helping the dog and calling for help. We left the girls so quickly that I called 5 minutes later, laden with guilt and concern, to see if they were alright with our “dump and run” approach. All was well and I could hear them giggling in the background.

We had 56 minutes left on the date clock so we headed to a haunt with outdoor hot tubs and a cafe. It represented the ideal parentopia: an opportunity to simultaneously caffeinate and relax. Parked and ready with 52 minutes to enjoy ourselves, we hustled to the door marked with a welcoming sign that read “open” in homey cursive. The door was locked and the lights were out. A far smaller sign stated the hours for the establishment… none of them were occurring during our hour.

Since our rare and unpracticed attempt at leisure failed, we decided without debate to head to the laundromat where we could at least get started on subduing our colony of soiled clothing. At least we would be doing it together, we said. Romance can happen anywhere, right? We did our best to re-connect while shoving malodorous fabric into two rows of double and triple loading washers. He filled the detergent reservoir and I selected the temperature settings for our 18 loads of family laundry. Somewhere in the process, my nose began bleeding. Despite the noteworthy comforts of this particular laundromat, it lacks a customer restroom and therefore, easy access to toilet paper. This all meant that I had to stumble around the thumping machines, trying to complete the laundry task quickly in order to still have date moments left on the clock, with blood trickling down from my left nostril to my mouth. Laundromat personnel ultimately took pity on me and rustled up a roll of toilet paper which allowed me to stem the tide and slam shut the final front-loader door before grabbing my husband and speed walking back to the car. Miraculously, we still had 26 minutes to enjoy each other and remember who else we ever were before returning to our epic and cherished roles as doting parents.

A cafe beckoned from the plaza and we sat, face to face over musky green tea and a foamy cappucinno to share a flaky chocolate croissant and discuss our lives for 14 precious minutes. I don’t know if people do this anymore, but I remember an era during which “speed dating” was popular for singles in Seattle. This apparently was our inadvertent version of once highly sought and heftily priced urban phenomenon.

It’s amazing what you can count as “dates” when you are wildly and chronically deprived of them.

Next time, maybe we can slow dance in the produce section at the co-op while squeezing avocadoes and shaking the moisture off of cilantro bundles before strolling arm in arm to the housewares isle to stock up on wipes, parchment paper, and dish soap together.