Last weekend I was finally starting to recover from the "swine flu incident", so my boyfriend and I took our girls and a few of their friends to some property he owns a couple of hours from where we live. Here are the girls at the start of our trip:
Aren't they beautiful?
I wish I had a picture from the end of the trip when they were all weeping from sunburn even though I kept yelling SUNCREEN at the top of my lungs every 15 minutes we were on the boat. I can only imagine how much pain they were in, we were boating for over 5 hours and they seemed to think that sunscreen would prohibit them from ever having another boyfriend and living life as lonely spinsters.
The trip was amazing, we went hiking to a damn the first day and ate dinner at a remote lodge. The accommodations consisted of a trailer and a small cabin, more of a shed really. I always marvel at the simplicity of going up there and leaving everything behind. It reminds me of what I'm striving to accomplish by throwing off many of the trappings that surround my life and resisting filling it with more, more, more!
When I got divorced two years ago, I took my wedding rings to a jeweler with the intent of trading them in and buying myself a big right hand ring. My daughter Emily had other ideas. She said it would be cool if we all got matching rings- (at one point she wanted matching tattoos, but I vetoed that idea). We ended up with cool matching diamonds. Mine is bigger than the two girls, but they all match. Or matched. Here is a picture of Emily just before she dropped hers in the lake.
I'm not sure why she was wearing it wake boarding, but when she tried to take it off, it slipped out of her hand. She looked so sad, and I almost had a heart attack, but in that moment I remembered that things aren't what mattered, and I knew if I yelled at her it wouldn't help, only make her feel worse. So we got her in the boat and she cried and it broke my heart to see her heart broken. At that moment I realized that if I hadn't been out on that lake, so far away from all my own status symbols and possessions, I might have reacted differently and I couldn't stop thinking about how much I have and how little most of it contributes to my happiness. What is important are waterfalls, days on a boat, sunsets, giggling teenage girls, campfires, boyfriends who are so kind and generous to take 6 women to the woods, family, milkshakes and star filled nights with the moon shining- and smores. I've never been so glad to be that far from a mall.