Divine packing

I am going up north tomorrow. Woohoo!
I am going for 2 weeks. I haven't gone up there for more than a week in 19 years. It's long overdue.
I am sooooo excited for this. It definitely is a place to recharge the batteries. I will look at blogging via iphone, or texting Andy (who is staying at home) and seeing if he can post. If that doesn't work, then my recently sporadic posting will become sporadic again, but due to lack of technology.

I hope that one day I will have a child (or be greedy and have children), and I can share this experience with them. I was lucky, fortunate, blessed, I'm running out of adjectives here, enough that a) my parents have a cottage, and b) that they were both teachers and so we were able to be up there for the whole summer as children.

This has given my sisters and I an awesome balance of being city/country kids. We spent our winters in the luxuries of public transit, schools, shopping, libraries in walking distance, radio and televison.

I was 5 I think when we got indoor plumbing up north. I think I was 7 when we got an indoor toilet. I was 14 when we got a flushable indoor toilet (previous one had been electric). I don't remember how old I was when we got a phone...maybe 10? Before that it was weekly trips to the nearest store (10 minutes or 20 minutes, depending on if we went to Utterson or Raymond) to use the payphones to check in with grandparents. Our first phone was on a party line, There was a sign above the phone indicating which was our ring (were we 2 long rings?). Th.e only radio station we could pick up was CFRB. I still think of Wally Crouter (sp?) when I think of radio announcers. You're a true swimmer when there are no sides to cling to, or bottom to anchor you. We don't even have a sandy beach area. Our lakefront is the Canadian Shield, rocky as all get out, and a pretty immediate 5 foot drop. You can touch bottom, but you don't want to. It's all slimy, icky and nasty.

We got weird looks from our city friends when we would exclaim "Look! There's a Great Blue Heron!" when we were home. The boys who would chase girls with worms were disappointed with our response of "I wish I had my fishing pole", rather than the expected shriek.

My dear hubby is a city slicker, through and through. He doesn't come up often. He enjoys sitting on the deck reading, napping and suntanning.
The cottage allows for some of that, but there is also swimming, walking, fishing, clearing up brush, and usually some reno project that requires countless trips up and down the hill carrying supplies. My sisters and I, at very young ages, were known to carry 2 x 4's, cinder blocks, and bags of cement.
My favourite thing though is freaking Andy out by popping things in my mouth. The first walk we ever went on he screeched "Don't do that, you don't know what it is!!". I didn't believe that he couldn't recognize a raspberry outside of a plastic container on a supermarket shelf. I tried to appeal to his frugal nature (Hey, we pay like 5 bucks for these at home), but even that can't override his city bred cautionary tales of "Don't eat berries off of bushes".

I feel grounded when I am up there. This has been a long time coming.

See you sooner or later :)