Wagon Dreams

Fall had started. My husband was his usual ecstatic self. The days were getting cooler. The light less harsh. All the things I hated. We were driving to stomp around the mountains, the aspens just starting to yellow, but first we needed gas.

He filled up the truck while I went inside to get Fritos, a favorite salty, high calorie trail snack. I wanted ruffles, and the only bags I could find were full size. I brought them to the counter.

"That'll be twelve eight-six," the bored guy at the register said.

Back in the car, I showed my husband what I'd gotten.

"Guess how much these cost?" I said.

He guessed six dollars.

"WRONG! Thirteen dollars."

We'd bought nearly four gallons of gas for the price of two bags of chips. My husband was not amused.

On the highway, the mountains nearing, my husband returned to one of his favorite verbal daydreams... Buying land and building a cabin on it.

"You know what I would do," he told me. "If I had a hundred million dollars?"

"Buy a cabin," I said.

"Yes, but with a hundred million dollars, I would buy a ton of land, then I would get that wagon wheel builder I watch on YouTube to build me a historically accurate covered wagon. And we could ride around on our land in our wagon and eat beans by a fire."

I had only been partially paying attention, but this made me turn to him.

"If you had a hundred million dollars, you would buy a wagon that was as awful as they were in 1840 and then eat beans?"

"Yes, we could do that together!"

That was certainly not part of my hundred million dollar future.

"This is not what I would do with a hundred million dollars," I said.

But he had begun to tell me about how wagon wheels are made.

"You know what's crazy." I cut him off. I had heard about the wagon wheels before. "We bought thirteen dollars worth of chips and in 1840..."

"We probably could have bought a wagon for thirteen dollars!" he said.

"And yet now, if you had a hundred million dollars, you'd buy the same kind of wagon."

He nodded. "Wouldn't it be great?"

I did not agree this would be great. But I wasn't worried. A future of having a hundred million dollars wasn't a pressing reality.

But a future of listening to wagon dreams was. Luckily I had my unreasonably expensive chips to help me through it.