I wanna go back!!

Since there's a serious lack of anything happening today I feel the need to entertain myself by speaking to the air again.  They used to say people were crazy for that, but now you can just say that your blog just hasn't been discovered yet.  And given the quality of my writing thus far that's probably a good thing in my case.  All of that has nothing to do with wanting to go anywhere.

This does.  In mid-July Joy and I packed up the kids and went to the family lake house in Tennessee.  My 2 year old daughter had never been and my son was a baby the one time he was up there, so they were both at a NEW PLACE.  They loved it as much as I always have.  The road in is graded every once in a while now but is still just dirt and gravel for the last half mile or so, which is a real novelty to them.  Add to that the fact that we could just walk down the hill in the back yard to go swimming off of the dock, play outside and still be "inside" on the screened back porch, build a little fire in the back to roast marshmallows or just throw rocks at a floating log and this place is almost a kid paradise.

It's nice for Joy and I, too.  The kids slept great at night in the bed right next  to ours (though it is about 3 feet off the ground and my son rolled out once).  During the day there's the distant drone of boats going up and down the lake and a lazy feeling in the air but I think night time is the best up there now that I'm, ahem, "grown up".  It's DARK up there at night and the only sounds are cicadas and peepers.  Just turning on the stove light and going out to sit on the back deck watching nothing, not talking,  just sitting together is sublime.

When I was a kid the entire road in, about 3 miles or so, was dirt and there were only a few houses around the cove that our house is at the end of.  Most of those were put up by relatives or close friends of the family.  We could walk over to the point and shoot bottle rockets over (or into) the water, or hike up the hill behind my great aunt's place on the other side of the road from us, or shoot my grandad's little .22 revolver at beer cans the adults stored out on the deck to pack out with us.

Nowadays most of the road is paved, albeit still with the contours of the gravel road beneath.  I think it's called "improved" instead of "maintained" by the DOT but I for one have always hated that "improvement".  Many more houses have gone up in the past 10 years or so and it's just not the same place anymore.  There's still a good distance between places out on our end but I don't know how long that will last.  I hope my kids get to enjoy it as it is for a long time before it becomes a subdivision instead of a hide away.  Maybe we can get up there one more time this year.

Probably not, though.  

Shame.