Moonset at sunrise

Summer vacation for me has always been a bit of an oddness- balancing the husband's not wanting to go against his interest in Camp, balancing what I love about my family with what I don't, my love for the old place on the lake shore, and the quiet moments where I can often get some crafting and writing done. I want- sometimes very hard- to go back to those days when I had the attic bedroom tucked under the eaves, lit by candle stub, and writing on scraps with a badly sharpened pencil (whittled last year so the damp got in over the winter), listening to the mice scaper in the distance, the waves crashing on rock, and the rain on a tin roof. When I was younger, I wrote fearlessly and often, but inexperienced with reality and full of possibility. I'm older now, and I'm crippled perhaps by knowing too much- I fear not writing anything that isn't formulated and hasn't been written before, paralyzed by indecision, and hating sap that comes out of bookstores now. So my pen stays still, and I worry if that's a tragedy. I think about writing, about wanting to write, while I am there. I touch on who I have been, am, and may be while I sit on the shore and feel the wind in my face. Camp is the only place I have been every year of my life, and part of me would be lost if I didn't spend a day there. Da calls it my inheritance, but I'm pretty sure I won't be owning any of it, so I fret over my parents' mortality and vitality when I'm there. I remember them young. I remember his parents. I think of a five-year-old boy in the back bedroom scared by slamming door.  ¶ 3:41 AM