Bushed in the Bush

Just spent three days of *much* needed R and R Up North, in that fabled Land O' Lakes, at my Dad and Heather's place...the place I've nicknamed 'Sanctuary Much'...you get the idea.

It was a wonderful three days. Even though I could barely keep my eyes open. Maybe especially because I could barely keep my eyes open.

I didn't realize I was quite this bushed. But apparently so...I woke up at or around seven a.m. each morning, which is two or three hours later than usual. Come early afternoon, I'd be dead on my feet, and so would be off my feet and...you know how most afternoon naps, you just kind of doze, wandering dreamily in and out of sleep? Not me, not this time. Practically unconscious--so deeply asleep I didn't hear the alarm calling my firefighter father to this. (He needed a nap at least as badly as I did, but it was not in the cards: he didn't get home until after one in the morning. And he'd been up most of the night before. I don't know how the man does it.)

Anyway, my nap-slash-coma would last two or three hours, I'd wake up for supper, and by eight or nine I'd be zonked again.

Part of it, of course, is the air. I could quickly run out of adjectives describing Georgian Bay air: fresh, pure, crisp, clean...it's the kind of air humans were meant to breathe, none of this polluted city crap. It's invigorating and exhausting all at once.

A bigger part of why I slept so much was because I could.

I can't say I have many household obligations, and those I have aren't that onerous. Work is between 44 and 49 hours a week, pretty much including commuting time, which is a lot less than many people work. Yet I feel as if I've been running flat out for weeks if not months, and what I've been doing pales next to what's coming, and I'm not going to write about that because I still have one day left of holidays and I'm going to spend it in a holidaze, damnit.

Up north, I had... I couldn't log into Facebook for some odd reason, and my dad doesn't have Wi-Fi, so my Internet ramblings were slightly curtailed (and yes, even though I've railed often and bitterly against the seemingly ubiquitous compulsion to be constantly connected, being cut off from my Facebook friends was...difficult). What I had was peace and tranquility--the quiet up there is its own soothing sound. You hear the wind soughing through the pines and the water slopping and sloshing and if you're lucky, some



And dark? It's not quite as pitch-black as it used to be, but it's plenty dark enough...mind you, on the coldest of winter nights, the starlight is almost enough to read by, and that's without the aurora borealis you might be blessed to see.

I spent lots of time out on the deck, deep in Justin Cronin's The Passage, waving at the boaters and being waved to in return. (The one mosquito in the ointment up at Dad's--besides mosquitoes and the need for ointment to repel same, of course--is the boaters. Just when you've sunk into a slice of heavenly silence, it's shattered by the insectile buzzing of a 75-horsepower Merc intrudes on your world and a boat roars by entirely too close to shore, kicking up a wake that jostles the boats in their moorings. Some of them zip by so fast they're practically a blur, and I wonder who it is they're trying to impress. Certainly not me. Making a boat go fast is not exactly a challenge, nor is it a commendable life skill, as far as I'm concerned.

And I'd come in for supper to my stepmother's fantastic shepherd's pie...or my dad's storm-barbequed burgers (the horizontal rain added just the right seasoning) or Heather's incredible peach cobbler. I don't even like peaches all that much...I was prepared to eat this and call it good, and it wasn't good, it was freakin' great.

And then back to sleep, lulled off to dreamland by what's currently my favourite piano concerto:



Maybe that's why I slept so much. What heavenly music.

Dad, Hez, love you both. I don't get up there near enough. Thanks for having me.