This is truly preposterous. I’m writing this from the shores of a tiny, forested island in Lake Champlain. A bunch of us have rented a remote cabin that was supposed to serve as a hermitage, a place to sever the telecommunicative tendrils that rule our lives. And yet, here among the Adirondack chairs nestled in a thick stand of evergreens, there’s a wireless signal.
Apart from the wi-fi, it's easy to convince yourself you've fallen through a time portal into Middle Earth. Many mornings we peer out over the water and beyond the hills, to Where Weather Comes From, wondering when the Golden Orb will return. We’ve had buckets of rain over the past 36 hours, and the paths are muddy and rutted. So we hang out together and laugh a lot, mostly from cabin fever. It’s a matter of time before we collectively snap and run outside for a game of Mudminton.
But the important thing is, for the next week I will be utterly autonomous. I will read, I will sleep, I will solve Acrostic puzzles. I will do what I want when I want, and everyone around me is old enough to wipe his or her own butt. It will be glorious, even if it rains so much that the lake swallows us whole.
While I'm gone, please click over to MamaPop, where I am a new contributor. You may also enjoy "The Line," starring a lot of people you'll recognize from SNL and UCB. (The first of seven episodes is here; you can find the rest by clicking on "Most Viewed" bar.)
See you Sunday, unless the Orcs get us.
