This is the last day of vacation. A day of immensity, sentiment, expectation. I can’t recall the past week, but I know it has been here. Each day has run into all the others like the colors in Van Gogh’s skies. So today I am looking closer.

Vacation: An extended period of recreation

Vacation: The action of leaving something one previously occupied

This is a week filled with recreation. We traveled. We left occupation.

This is a week where occupation followed us anyway. Motherhood, and fatherhood too, can never be abandoned. Though a vacation’s moments blow like the breeze, so do a mother’s moments. They are unpredictable and many.

This is a lake filled with fish and loons, edged in rocks and docks and boats, but mostly tall, dark trees.

This is a cool breeze on a porch. It is a family sitting in lawn chairs, filling bellies with root beer floats and gingerbread cookies, lobsters, sandwiches and snacks, while wind chimes sing the tune of relaxation. This is a yard of dirt for kids to touch and dig. This is sensory play at its finest.

This is where breeze is as welcomed as it is intrusive. It surrounds our skin, blows our hair, invades our lungs, moves the lake in ripples, and distorts reflections.

This is where our life has paused. It is a place rich with my husband’s memories, a place where I am forming my own. The place where my husband spent every summer growing up, the place we honeymooned and once before vacationed with our little family.

This is a place once foreign to me. Growing up in Florida, I knew beaches and year-round warmth. Now, I am in Maine, at the other end of US1. Here, warmth is found but not always felt in the air.

This is a kind of warmth that doesn’t make you sweat, but offers room to breathe. It almost forces breath while at the same time stealing it. Nature. Beauty. Only being here can truly describe.

This is the writer’s dilemma. To figure out a way to show a reader what is meant. How do I make you hear what I hear, feel what I feel, see what I see? How can I put this dirt on your toes when you will probably never sit on the slats of this porch, listen to these leaves blow, watch the changing reflections of this lake?

This is a place we leave tomorrow. Then we will go home to a place where sidewalks tell our path.

This is life, where warmth is offered, yet created.

This is vacation: when eyes open for every moment, where we realize that setting is important, that we always are somewhere, but more than that, we always are. No matter where we take our family, there our family is.

This is a pledge to open eyes, something that is necessitated by the change of location.

This is a location.

This is family.

This is where memories are made from moments.

This is always possible.