A Great Gift

Boyfriend and I returned today from a brief camping trip, courtesy of my pal R, who gave us the gift of four nights camping at Voyageur Provincial Park - the park previous known as Carillon, to those of us old enough to remember such things!

It was a gift in every sense of the word. It gave us a break, a change, from daily duties and weekly worries. It got us outside, in the sunshine (and the rain) and fighting the bugs and trying to remember in which container we had packed things. It got us under the trees and into the fireflies. It was magical.

Boyfriend did a LOT of heavy lifting while I watched, helpless.  That trailer is a monster! And it doesn't help that it's 30 years old! All the legs are stuck, all the bits are breaking. At one point when Boyfriend wasn't feeling so well it occurred to me that I had no idea how to close this thing up on my own, nor did I possess the skills to do so! Thankfully, Boyfriend survived his odyssey none the worse for wear, and a lot better for being in the fresh air.

Hubby came down on his motorcycle and spent a night in his newfangled tekkie-tent, showing off all his lightweight zero-gravity toys for the avid camper, while scrupulously avoiding the beach.

I discovered that some of the ideas I'd had in my twenties, like the LARGE pot of water kept hot over the fire at all times, wasn't such a silly idea after all, especially when it came to needing water to wash and rinse dishes or for an impromptu sponge bath at the campsite. Boiling ONE pot of water for coffee is bad enough - boiling SIX pots of water so you can wash the dishes is seriously tedious! (Plus, after you boil six pots of water, the residue that collects around the pot gives one extra pause...it may look like calcium, but it feels like soap... Good thing we brought the Brita filter!)

When we left to go camping, we were both stressed. Boyfriend has been out of work much much longer than either of us ever expected. He's been dealing with his anxieties, I've had to deal with my own sense of entitlement.

That's right - the E-word. The thing we all accuse Millenials for having a sense of. Entitlement. I never once in my life thought of myself as having a sense of entitlement, but here we are, looking bankruptcy in the face, maybe losing our home, maybe moving to an apartment, we don't know...All this is going to have to happen soon. And I kept looking around in total astonishment and thinking, "What do you mean I might not live in a bungalow in the suburbs? What do you mean we might have to get ride of nearly everything and move to a really small place? But I've always lived in a bungalow in the suburbs!"

Stuff like that. That's entitlement. And yes, people lose their homes, and I might be next, and it happens to nice people all the time. Because the market changes, because social systems only extend so far, and after that, something has to give. And sometimes, what has to give is how we see ourselves.

In the face of all that is to come, in the middle of a four-day camping trip, I found happiness. Boyfriend and I went to the beach. I taught someone's dog how to swim. I got to pat some other dogs. I didn't get sunburned. I floated for hours on my floatie toy. All my hard work ahead of time, cooking up food that we could grab and eat, paid off! Open a jar, splorp into a bowl, presto! Vichyssois! Open tupperware, splorp onto a plate, presto! Tuna salad! None of this nonsense of "we'll buy our food when we get there," stuff I used to hear for years! What a crock! Who wants to spend the only four days off they get a year shopping and chopping?! I'd much rather do that ahead of time and enjoy the fruits of my labour on the spot, when it counts! And I did, and we did, and it worked!

I walked the dark road lit only by fireflies and ceased to worry about the mundane, the everyday, and about what was expected of me. For a few brief days, I merely was.

And it was wonderful.

Now we are home. Boyfriend is exhausted from the physical work, but he is rested from his stress. And he had some calls for jobs while we were away, so who knows...?