Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Finally figured out that I had changed my DNS settings; switching 'em around again reinstates my network access, so here we are ready to recap.

Tuesday the wee one got the earache that had been going around, so we spent the afternoon at the clinic, and then in Provincetown for a bit of pharmaceutical shopping. P-town was a mess as always, hot and crowded with tourists and shirtless dogwalkers strutting their homosexual chests, but we bumped into new in-laws Jesse and Jaimee, also childless, and shared a bar beer, which was a nice mid-day respite.

Tuesday night we left the siblings and new cousin-in-laws at the beach, headed out with Mom and Dad and the kids to the Cape Cod Melody Tent for this year's Acoustic Planet tour: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Del McCoury Band, and fiddle virtuoso Natalie McMaster, first separately and then, finally, together in an absolutely incredible jam session. Third row seats, the stage in-the-round on a rotating stage, so we got to see the fingerplay up close. Amazing experience, all 'round.

Cassia managed to sleep through the encore, but Willow was a trouper; for her efforts, Victor Wooton (yes, THE Victor Wooton) threw an authentic Flecktones trademark -- pink stuffed hippo in a beret -- to Willow as the show came to a close, and then waited while the guys in front of us got the message and passed it back, which was the nicest thing ever. I totally covet the hippo, and have asked Willow to put it "up high" when we get home, so we can always remember this day.

Wednesday was a transitional day, with the newlyweds and her sister's family off for various worldly parts; mostly, we packed and cleaned, and said goodbye throughout. That night -- last night -- Darcie's parents arrived to take their place; we walked down to the pier for fried fish, and headed down to the bay shoreline, where the tide was so far out you could see the trapped bluefish jump to catch the bennies. Willow and I watched a shark feed, all fin and sudden flip like a mini-Jaws; some guy caught one with his squidbait, so now she can tell the world she's petted a shark and lived to tell the tale.

Today has been pretty quiet, all told. Darcie and her parents, the kids and I walked over the nearby bikebridge, hiked a conservated island, and sat awhile in the shade by the marshbasin, watching the fiddler crabs scuttle up the beach. Plan for later was originally an ocean-side beach, but then, the plan was to leave at 2:30, and with deadline come and gone I'm no longer sure I know what we're doing here, now or next.

Willow seems more subdued without Felix around, though she's clearly exhausted, almost beached out. Cassia nurses and nurses and otherwise behaves as if she could really use a stable environment for a while. Jonathan Katz in concert tonight with my parents, which should be okay if we can manage to stay silent. Darcie's birthday was yesterday, and we've promised each other a date Friday night, but I wish we had had just a few minutes to ourselves, just man and wife, in the last two weeks.

Patty and Neil are talking about leaving pre-sunrise tomorrow to beat the traffic off the cape, and I kind of wish we were going, too.

This kind of vacation is neither vacant nor that elusive vacating of the usual stresses and strife of the homeworld. Some of that is just what happens when you have kids; some is what happens when you try to summer with your parents, and with a rotating cast of over 20 others, coming and going like fish darting in the rushes under Uncle Tim's bridge. But some of it is truly that our home is new enough, our life on the road no longer a necessity, our summer almost gone, and our lives intended to be smaller, our wanders shorter than this.

It's been nice to be in the sun, I guess. But all told, I'd rather be home, even if it makes the workworld approacheth sooner. We're counting days, wishing we had the freedom to leave on our own, and Sunday cannot come too soon.