Okay, they don’t really suck. It’s the coming back after having a great vacation that stinks. Seven days in the beautiful Upper Pennisula doesn’t quite make me a “yooper,” (look it up!), but it sure does make me wistful for the kind of peace and quiet that guided our days.
Up on the Keweenah Peninsula (it’s really an island but who’s complaining) cell phone coverage is spotty at best. Where we were, all the way up in Copper Harbor, there were no cell phone towers at all. That meant no loud conversations from the yahoo sitting at the next table over and no drivers going a measly ten miles an hour while they were wrapped around a phone.
It was bliss.
No phone calls. No missed calls. No contact with the outside world. If you call yourself a writer,
you’ll understand the contented smile on my face, the lack of creased brow and the urge for even more silence except for the rustling of the trees, the scurrying of chipmunks and the imagined black bear searching for food.
We did hear some tankers toot their horns as they travelled west to Duluth for more iron ore. And sitting in the backyard around a fire we let the crackling of wood mingle with the tinkle of the ice in our cocktails.
The loudest sound was the overactivity of my own imagination. All that silence was a wonderful, cushiony pillow for my brain to relax into the pile of books we brought. I read up on my Qigong practice, devoured Claire Messud’s first novel, When the World was Steady, reread Howard’s End (for our Reading as a Writer class), and consumed Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar between breakfast and lunch. Oh, did I mention we got to read at breakfast each morning. Heaven!
Now I am back and it’s only taken one day for the demands of work to help my body forget how relaxed it was. But luckily, my mind is still on fire and the words and images and characters I spent the week with are still rattling around in my brain. I can hear snippets of their thoughts and conversations. I add to it my own characters, play with the possibilities. There is no silence in my head; only the delicious sounds of stories being born.
