Where did you go? Nowhere

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It wasn't a real vacation, not the kind you write home about. "Dear Family, Today we saw the Eiffel Tower and toured the Louvre and tomorrow we're headed for Versailles. Gotta hurry and get this in the mail because we're off to dinner."

No, it wasn't like this at all. We caught no planes. We kept no schedules. We didn't attempt to squeeze in a year's worth of culture or nature or relaxation in seven days. I didn't even have a list of books I was determined to read.

It was not a stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off sort of intermission at all. It was merely a slowing down, a leaning over and dragging one foot on the ground. The merry-go-round still spun, but at a slower pace, so I got to lean back and look up and around.

And it was nice.

We had made all sorts of more alluring plans. We were going to fly to Wyoming and rent a car and drive with the windows open and inhale clean mountain air and walk through forests and ride through Yellowstone and sleep by bubbling streams.

Then we decided that no, maybe there really wasn't enough time. Maybe we should go to Martha's Vineyard then Nantucket and then Maine.

But why would we? This was way too much coming and going, rushing here, then there. So we scrapped these plans, too.

Maybe I'll just take a week off and catch up on things at home, I said. But I was nervous about this. Catching up is a game you never win. You clean one room and the rest of the rooms look shabby. You cut the grass and pull a few weeds and you stand back and notice that the bushes need trimming. What if I took a week off and worked and worked and got nothing accomplished?

Still, a week at home with time to trim the bushes was what I wanted.

It's a funny thing. Someone peeking in through a window of my house wouldn't have thought, hey there's a woman on vacation. Look at her sitting there, feet up, doing nothing.

No, someone would have thought, there's the housekeeper, or that must be the gardener, or she has to be someone's secretary. Will you look at that pile of mail.

Someone just looking would have seen a woman hard at work. But none of it was work at all.

I bought flowers for my front lawn. Impatiens for the wheelbarrow that has sat empty since Easter. Dark pink zinnias and chrysanthemums for the barren circle of dirt at the top of my driveway. More impatiens to hang on the lamp post. Two green plants for the front steps. Hibiscus for the backyard. A few perennials to plant in a garden decimated by a "landscape artist" who mistook 20-year-old perennials for weeds and pulled them all.

I scrubbed the refrigerator and the dog and the lawn furniture. Together, my husband and I shaped and trimmed wildly overgrown bushes and cut the grass and edged and swept and when we looked around, though there was still so much more to do, we smiled because there was so much that we had done.

I answered my mail, read one book ("The Cliff Walk" by Don Snyder) and listened to another ("The Horse Whisperer" by Nicholas Evans) sat with Grandma, had dinner at my father's and lunch with a friend and saw another friend for another dinner and went to the gym three times and the Dairy Barn twice and walked the dog and read the arts sections of the newspaper and every word in People magazine.

It was a perfect week.

"Where did you go," people ask?

"Nowhere," I say.

"So what did you do?"

"Nothing," I reply.

But the truth is I did everything I wanted. I slowed down, leaned back, looked up and around. For one whole week, I stopped chasing my tail.