We're back from Maine.
It was too wonderful; it's hard to be back. The inn was perfect: the accomodations cozy and spotless, the innkeeper friendly and helpful, the coffee more than passable. We spent the days wandering towns and beaches and lobstering villages and our evenings tucked inside our room with a fire. We'd take a bottle of wine and rest our wind-whipped bodies in the bath before falling asleep under the down comforters. Most nights we fell asleep without meaning to; the fresh air overwhelming us and the long walks tiring us more than we thought. We slept off the stress and exhaustion of the past few weeks, years. We slept dreamlessly.
We made it a vacation in the true sense: we did very little and accomplished nothing. For several days we simply...exsisted. We ate, we walked, we slept. We talked, we were silent. We ignored the lives that waited for us upon our return. It was the first time in a long time where I felt that I was living in the present, that I was seeing the world around me and not simply muddling through it. The surroundings were new and beautiful and, to us, startling:
The silence and the darkness of night - no city lights, only dim street lamps and the milky way. No drunken revelers stumbling by our bedroom window at 1 am, no traffic.
And the town...I'd forgotten that walking down a street could be a peaceful, pleasant experience. There were no harassing bums demanding money and cursing at us, no pretentious fashionistas with small anxious dogs yapping at us, no taxis trying to run us down. Just people here and there...the kind of people you would be tempted to refer to as "folk."
Now I'm back in Philadelphia, and it's a bit like coming home to an ugly nagging wife after a tryst with a kind and beautiful lover.
The coffee is better and sure, there is more to do. But right now I'm still in the mode where I want to be happy being instead of busy doing. Vacation has a way of highlighting just how much of life is running in circles and making you wonder, if that's the case, why you don't choose better scenery.