One More Bit of Happy

If you live in Maine, it is inevitable that you know someone who owns waterfront property. This property could be a camp or a cabin or a cottage. The details don't really matter. What matters is this: It's on the water, and it's beautiful.

Lucky for me, three of the six people in my department own waterfront property and have said to me on numerous occasions, "Hey. Do you want to go up to the cottage for a weekend or something? Just bum around?"

And I got to take advantage of that during my extended birthday week--after all, I am a girl who knows how to seriously milk a birthday--and so Emily (whose birthday is five days after mine) and I packed an insane amount of food and invited some people up, and we spent a few days doing absolutely nothing of importance at one of the prettiest places ever.

Sure, I was a flustered mess when Emily got to my house so we could caravan together, and, sure, this meant I was still making the needs-to-chill frosting for her birthday cake when she arrived, and, sure, this meant I finished it on the fly and packed it into a tapered dish filled with ice so it could start chilling on the way to the pond. Can you sense what's going to happen next? On a particularly wicked corner, the pan the frosting was in dumped and sent a gush of warm chocolate and heavy cream across my car. Then, after I'd cleaned it up best I could, I took another wicked corner--why, why, WHY am I physically unable to not act like a race car driver when it's really important?!--and spilled even more of the frosting.

Still, even that wasn't enough to take my mind away from just how wonderful everything was going to be over our birthday weekend. I mean, look at this:

It was a whole weekend of lovely. (LOVELY!) And--you can see the proof above--there was enough frosting to coat the whole cake. It was a miracle. A birthday miracle. And so was the rest of the weekend.

And now this weekend I'm feeling pangs of jealousy because I'd like to be up there with this stack of essays I've got sitting in front of me. They're the first of the semester, and I'm thinking that maybe (just maybe!) I wouldn't take it so hard that they're rotten because all I'd have to do is walk down to the dock, slip into a kayak, and paddle hard and fast away from all that sad student prose, all the things that make me wonder if I'm good at my job, if I've ever done a single thing to help a student in my entire career.

Oh, how I wish I was in a kayak.