As soon as school ended, I packed up the kids and went north to a family wedding on the coast of Massachusetts. We stayed a week in a beautiful home on a rocky coastline where we watched boats go in and out of the harbor, caught crabs and explored winding lanes of seaside cottages. I wanted to move into each and every one. And then there was the lovely wedding, seeing a couple joined in marriage and visiting with family. It was the best kind of vacation – easy, memorable, comfortable.
I haven’t been back to Massachusetts since we moved last summer. It’s been a year since we moved to Pennsylvania and after all the hustle and bustle of some place new, there’s more space to miss what we left. Spending a week on the water in the quintessential New England town of Marblehead, driving streets without street signs, wincing at the chill of Atlantic water, and being offered chowder and haddock at every meal, left me feeling an ache for the familiar of a place I used to call home.
When I travel, I fall hard for a place imagining my life if I lived there – where we would live, what we would do. It’s easy to picture yourself strolling out for coffee, paddle boarding for exercise, sitting on a rocky bluff with a cozy sweater while your kids skip rocks. I don’t think about how many tourists would be taking over my town every summer, how aggravating the parking is or how far it is to an actual grocery store or highway for that matter.
When you’re on vacation, you turn off that logistics part of your brain which makes coming home to laundry and dust and an empty fridge seem hard and dull.
It doesn’t help that I’m in a state of transition moving from school to summer, vacation to home, packed to unpacked. It’s left me feeling a little displaced. A little disconnected. Neither here nor there. How I felt a year ago, all the uprooting and uncertainty of transitioning to a new home is bubbling to the surface too.
While my vacation tugs at me, it’s time to get on with real life. To get present in the here and now. To reconnect with everything that I put on hold for a week. To wipe away the dust and fill the fridge with summer food and get back to the routines and habits that keep me grounded. I need to rehab my vacation brain.
Because in a few weeks when we head to family beach week, I’ll be packing up and doing it all again.
Sounds like the perfect vacation spot. I am yearning for the beach and water. Good luck on your recovery.
Wow, my vacation brain was so bad I let this comment slip right through my fingers. It was a nice vacation, the hardest to recover from. Feel like I’m hitting my summer stride this week.