Our Vacation

We brought some of our family games with us. My father even played a few rounds of Stinker and Five Crowns with us, which was awesome, because normally he’s not a big one for games, particularly not in the evening when he is tired. He was just as good at Stinker as I had thought he’d be. But, it was my husband’s entry for the category of breakfast cereal slogans that was the most memorable. It was “Doo doo that sunrise!” After that round, every player who had the same selection of letters also incorporated “doo doo” into their answer.

We picked blueberries at a little farm on a hill. My dad made blueberry pancakes for us the next day. We had a lot of blueberries left over, and we brought them home with us. Later my husband and I made them into a blueberry pie. Yum.

We took a lot of walks. We walked around the neighborhood, down the shore, and over to the local memorial park, among other places. My dad took me and the kids down a local nature trail. He and I also found a nice area of sandy shore that was open to the public but not much frequented, as it was sort of hidden away. We brought my husband and kids back there the next day. It turned out to be a great shell-collecting site, plus there were little fishes, mussels, and shrimp in the water, and wildflowers along the edges. We had the beach to ourselves while we were there. It was pretty much perfect.

There is a deer that browses in the neighborhood. My parents have named her Flora. She got very close to the house one day. We watched her from the window for a while, then Livia and I went outside and took selfies with her in the background. Flora was remarkably chill about us being in the yard with her.

I chitchatted a lot with my parents. It was great.

We went to a maple syrup store where we sampled four types of syrup (light, medium, and dark, plus bourbon-infused). The owner poured out samples for himself, too. If it’s possible to be addicted to syrup, he’s gotta be, because I’ve never seen anyone happier to taste maple syrup. It was a novel experience for me to drink syrup, though my mom tells me that it’s a popular thing in Vermont, which explains the guy’s addiction, I guess. We spent a veritable fortune, buying three kinds of syrup, plus maple kettle corn, maple cotton candy, and maple candy. But, to our surprise, grandpa picked up the bill, so all that yumminess was free, free, deliciously free. Thanks, Grandpa!

The running joke during our stay was that every outbuilding that the kids saw, from the smallest shed to the biggest barn, was a “writer’s haven” (a place where a writer can get away from the world and write in solitude–my husband is planning to build one for me). The more dilapidated and/or less suitable the building was for writing, the funnier it was.