A vacation, desperate and incongruous

Is it a vacation or a forced evacuation for the mental health of your loved ones? You tell me...

Our family of seven is back from a stay in a 5-bedroom farmhouse that was big enough for us to spread out into different rooms or come together in a common area. The weather was beautiful as most of our days were sunny and warm.

We had a pool.

We went to the top of Jay Peak.

We went to Hill Farmstead Brewery.

Thursday, our one rainy day, I spent the majority of time in bed with Taza chocolate and mint tea. I stayed under the covers while listening to the steady rainfall—its changing rhythms from morning pattering to sporadic afternoon torrents and finally an applause against the glass panes as the sky shifted from slate to a deep graying darkness. During this extremely rare period of physical inactivity for me I finished Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and re-read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Man Machine. I got up to make dinner and afterward I learned how to play Apples to Apples Junior with the little girls and my husband.

Although I love this time together, I end up even more exhausted than at home. Preparing for the vacation was strenuous. Packing and loading the car could have qualified as a feat of Hercules. And all the work of planning activities, daily menus, cooking, laundry, and household tasks in a foreign house was mentally and physically taxing.

People could argue that all vacations are luxuries. But are they really? What if you have someone who seems to only find joy in the north where the summer sun extends a long light arching across the day? The green mountains and birdsongs call out a happiness from the cold hibernation of a suffering body. What else can I do but wring money out of our monthly budgets and remember to do pushups so I am strong enough to do this every year?

For me our summer trips feel like desperate and brief respites from the stress—the every day strains that we must return to. However, the jarring change brought on by the novelty of new surroundings shakes the real lesson out of the yielding trees,

There is a difference between living and surviving.

On vacation I see the people I love—who have to struggle more than most —become free enough from the expectations and burdens of the world to live like anyone else. Even just for a moment, it is long enough to catch one’s breath—to brace one’s self.

And now we are back.