Vacation

I'm just got back from a vacation up at my parents home outside Buffalo. It's a rare thing for me to get up there at this time of year, which is too bad as there's really no better season to be there. Particularly with the hot and sunny weather they had this week. Nice to be out of the city. Particularly this spring when I've been feeling thoroughly worn down.

It's so easy to forget things when you're away. Like the fact that summer evenings last just a bit longer up there. Or how strongly it smells of freshly-mown grass and garden mulch on the bike ride to my father's office. Or how quiet it is. It's not that I have any desire to live in the suburbs, really. It's just that there are days when I'm so tired of living on top of people and below people and being jammed up against people on the subway every day. It's good to have a little space.

I helped clean out junk drawers and my bedroom and got a good bit of knitting and reading done. I swam laps for the first time in about eight years, took a class called Body Pump after which my legs were sore for three days, went running and rollerblading. Despite all the activity, it was the most relaxing vacation I've had in ages.

On my last day there my mother and I went to visit Forest Lawn, which is a large Victorian cemetery. It has lots of open green space, a creek running through it, and the graves of famous Buffalonians like Millard Fillmore. My mother and I had talked about going to see it for a few years and looked into taking a tour. They weren't running any until June though, so we just wandered around, semi-successfully avoiding a group of school children there on a field trip.

It turns out that it's a lovely place, but not exactly making the list of the most interesting cemeteries we've seen. It does, though, feel like exactly the sort of cemetery you'd expect to find in Buffalo. And it's hard to complain about taking a walk with family on a beautiful spring day.

And now I'm back in New York (after what was probably the least problem-beset flight into JFK I've ever been on) and on all sorts of post-vacation and pre-summer errands. But feeling much more equal to the many tasks at hand.