Haven’t been motivated to write much, this year (obviously), but lately I’ve a nagging notion to put pen to paper. Put word to thought, pixel to screen, as 2020’s finale looms in the glide path. Hoping that on the other side of the calendrical horizon lies some kind of, you know, denouement.
We’re doing okay, I should note. The little island in the Salish Sea became home, once again, since school ended in June. Save for a week back in the city, when we fetched ‘the tiny’, a Vardo-styled caravan we snagged off Craigslist and subsequently pulled ashore. The girls love the thing, and have traded weeks of residence throughout the summer.
Otherwise, of our months here, I’m not sure what to write. I mean, it’s island time: where we always seem closer as a family, happier on the whole, and let the days blur. Moment to moment, it’s the crunch of gravel underfoot, the buzz of dragonflies, the smell of woodsmoke and wet trees. That steady influx of signals, speaking to a slow turn of seasons, and not much else.
And yet. This period out here admittedly different than the usual ‘getaway’ weekends: Thanks to a recently-installed antennae that’s 125 feet up a fir tree, we have internet here, now. (Just not a whole lot of it — a wan dozen-megabits or so.) Enough that I‘ve managed to work remote for months, and the girls have done a couple weeks of school, already.
Sadly, though, we’re pushing our luck with the logistics — I’ve scrambled to run our generator when the kids belatedly inform me that their laptop batteries are low, and we keep having to disable webcams when Zoom calls start to freeze. Never mind how hard it is (for any of us) to focus properly as three video-conference calls take place in a 280 square-foot cabin.
So. Cozy as the wood fires may be, we’re headed back city-side, soon. Work and school will likely feel a little more serious again, more central to each day. My brain says that’s a good thing; my heart cautions otherwise.
We’ll see.
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