Summer's Last Hurrah

It's been nearly a month since my last blog update, and since I last wrote, we've been camping 3 times! We just got back a few hours ago from what was our final camping expedition of the 2006 summer season. We've explored our wee state from one corner to another, from Cape Cod to the Berkshires. Our last two campouts,however, were within 15 miles of each other, in Old Orchard Beach and Ferry Beach (Saco), Maine.

Our kids love camping as much as Lee and I do, accepting heavy morning dew which drips on their head as they wake up, sand in their sleeping bags, which is my personal bane (ugh, shudder), and tree frogs singing the night away. We've had rainy days and hiked anyway, sunny days to play in surf and sand, hot days and cold nights. More importantly, we've had time off from the regular day to day ' stuff ' that seems so important when it's there in your face, but, once freed from the restrictions of day to day living, seem so trivial. Who cares if you rememberd to go to the bank when you can watch a spider wrap up its meal over by the pine tree? I wish that every day could be spent watching spiders and dragonflies, smelling pine trees and ocean air, seeing the Milky Way in the dark night sky at the ocean's edge, and the calling of tree frogs. But life does come back to reality, to laundry and phone calls and tidying and banking and all the other work that gets left behind when we head off to explore, pulling our trusty camper behind us.

So, here we are, home again, tired in body, but restored in spirit. I finally feel that I'm ready for Autumn, for our many tree's colorful transition to their resting time, for raking leaves and trick-or-treating, for pumpkin and apple picking, and all the rest! But I've promised myself that I'll look for those spider webs in the bushes, do more than simply glance at the sky when I hang out that last load of wash after dark but really take a few minutes to look in awe at all those worlds up there, and smell the wonderful scents of autumn. And that's a resolution that I plan on keeping!