Skip to main content

Between the trees, among the leaves.

So tomorrow I head up to Connecticut for the rest of the week. I'll be doing a good deal of chores--closing down the lakehouse for the season, painting and mending, and so forth--but I look forward to the time spent among the trees and the leaves, the wind and the cold.

(Mind you, it's not normally that cold when I visit, but I've never been up there this late in fall...and it's in the mountains...like, the highest mountain or something...it's in a cute town, though....)


Anyway, I love this place. My family's had a lakehouse up there since the 1930s; it's got this stolid, stonelike quality to it. Immovable. Of course it's really made of wood, and being 80 years old needs a bit of work now and then. Which is my excuse for going up this weekend, to do some work to fix it up a bit and close it down for the season.

I'm excited. A bit of time to go clear my head and look at some nature and think, if I must, or write, if I can. Honestly, just spending time there is more than enough reward as far as I'm concerned. But right now--I could definitely use some me-time.

Work's continued to be stressful and herky-jerky. I still don't know if I want to stay and continue working there or leave, or when I'd leave if I did decide to.... I'm still trying to figure out my writing, what I want to do with it, how, all that. There's a lot on my mind; sometimes recently it's been getting to me.

But the lake. Oh, the lake and its trees. I'll freeze my ass off and work a bunch during most of the 3 days I get to spend there or whatever, but, frankly, I'll be happy.


Comments

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.