As wonderful as travel is, sometimes turning the sprinkler off, running your daughter to work and food shopping are the best darn things in life.

I'm sitting here looking out at the lake swathed in golden light, the trees lit an emerald green. A mallard and his mate are swimming past our dock.

Life is good.

Hello Lori,
Can we come ? We have nothing to do this weekend. No cookout daugther going to two weddings back to back today. I cleaned carpets today Oh, what fun. I want to come over where you are . Complain , Complain . That is me.

[ May 28, 2005, 09:54 PM: Message edited by: Nancy50 ]

I grew up in NYC and we had hurricanes. I was never scared.

We moved to Chicago (and I later lived in Oklahoma) both of which got tornadoes, which completely freaked me out.

Now I'm in California with earthquakes, but I don't think too much about them.

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Dotsie, I always try to clean the house before I leave for vacation -- not out of fear, but because it'll be one less thing that needs to be done when I get back home. Whenever I leave for more than a day or two, there seems to be a bazillion things that mysteriously piled up in my absence. Having one less chore just makes my life a little easier.

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Baltimore 2007 ??
Can I put in my request for timing?: not during any holidays, and not May, July, Nov. or Dec.

Lori your description of the lake is downright poetic! Travel is wonderful but I know whenever I'm on the last day of a great trip, my thoughts are ALWAYS, "there's no place like home".....

Good morning, everyone. The lake is indeed idyllic, but something in this crisp mountain air is wreaking havoc with my laptop. It's going bonkers. I hope I get through this post. Little poker and "Kill Spyware" pop-ups are bursting out all over the place.

Dotsie, your husband's seizure in Punta Cana must have been a frightening experience. But the fact that you all handled the situation well, calmly and together is a testament to your love and strength. I can understand how having a family member with a medical condition that needs constant monitoring would create special worries when traveling.

And I know what you mean about the passage in the book that connects us once again with home. I remember being very emotional when I wrote those pages. I was reliving the end of an incredibly special journey, but I know I was also sad because the act of writing the book was coming to an end. Writing "Ribbons" was a wonderful journey in itself, one that Adam and Dana also shared with me -- in some ways it's "our" book. Endings, of any kind, are so often tinged with sadness.

At the book club reading the other night, one of the women asked me to describe those moments when we neared our home. She was struck by that part of the story, as well.

Sounds like everybody's cool with the idea of a convention! Look out, Baltimore!

Nancy, if my lake cottage weren't such a wreck right now, I'd invite the whole boomer world up here! But we did some remodeling over the winter, and the place is in total disarray. Furniture in the middles of rooms, carpets rolled up and stacked like logs, boxes of nails everywhere, a giant table saw in the living room. We're living on bowls of cereal, after we clean the drywall dust out of the bowls...

But it is gorgeous. I heard the call of one of our two resident loons early this morning. And a great blue heron took off from the woods and floated past me while I ate my cereal on the deck.

I think I'll try to write something today. (After I do some painting. Priorities...)

I'm with Pam...I'm right there with you as your describe the screen. Does it get any more relaxing than that? Wahhhhhh...I want a cabin. Adopt me. I don't eat much. Okay, that's a lie. But...I clean! Okay, lie number two. I, ah...ah...oh forget it.

JJ

Do you paint JJ? She needs help painting.

OK. Its' an hour later, and I haven't picked up a paintbrush yet. The rest of the family is busy, but I'm finding as many non-painting things to do as I can. Any minute now, my loved ones will tell me to get my butt in gear, I'm sure.

But actually, my butt just was in gear. I may not be able to run right now, but I can bike, so I just took my trusty $79 K-Mart steed out onto the dirt roads and got a little cardio in. A lot of cardio, actually. My K-Mart steed used to have 12 speeds, but they've collapsed themselves down into two. It's work.

I had a good ride, but I also had a rolling reminder of why May is a little tough up here in the woods. It's black fly season. (There's a black fly supper tonight at the town hall. We don't eat them, we just talk about them.) As I was riding, I became a human windshield. My legs and shorts and sweatshirt with the giant moose head on it were plastered with dead flies. I forgot my sunglasses, so two flew into my eyes, and I swallowed about a pound of them. (OK, so we do eat them.)

Still sound idyllic, guys? Still want to come up here to the New Hampshire woods? I guess if you want to enjoy the loons and herons, you gotta swallow a few flies.

The black flies can read the calendar. They appear on the first of May, and they disappear on the first of June. It's uncanny. We've been coming up here for 20 years, and it happens every season. Three days from now, there will be no black flies.

Time to paint. I'm feeling guilty watching all the sweat equity being invested around me.

Oh heck...I thought she meant like water colors, or painting on canvas...you meant paint as in manual labor, right? count me out. Let me know when the works done...what? Hey, I'm fragile...

I'm still trying to figure out how the flies know the calendar...down here the flies must be dumb as poop...they hang around all blasted summer.

JJ

No watercolor art going on up here this weekend. Manual labor and then some. I, however, do not have to paint! We discovered, to my extreme delight, that Dana loves to prime walls. She loves it so much that she asked if she could paint the walls that were assigned to me. How could I deny her this small pleasure?

So, she painted while I went outside, with my mosquito-net hat on to keep those very intelligent calendar-reading flies from flying up my nose, and I hacked down scrub growth that had grown up around the property since last year. Then, I hauled five wheelbarrow loads of the stuff up the road to a dumping area. I paid my dues today.

We're going to skip the black fly supper at the town hall and head into Keene for Mexican food. Keene's a neat little college town not far from the Vermont border in the southwestern corner of New Hampshire. When we're up here in the woods, it's our "big city." Keene is where they filmed the movie, "Jumanji," and there's a mural painted on one of the main square's old brick walls that says, "Parrish Shoes." It was in an opening scene of the movie, and they left it there.

It's going to be a good year for great blue herons. I saw four of them sailing all at once above our cove. I've never seen that many gathered at one time before. Quite beautiful.