It is so beautiful up here, the great wilderness of the northern Lower Peninsula. We are so blessed to be allowed to visit my Dad and stepmom up here at their cabin every summer. It is the highlight of my kids year, which explains the cross-country road trip to get here.
It’s just beautiful here. We are totally secluded from everyone and everything – no technology, no telephone and just this beautiful log cabin on a private lake on hundreds of acres shared by only a handful of families a nd surrounded by protected forest much further than the eye can see and the kids can explore. It is literally an oasis from modern city life – a place where eagles come to fish and loons sing their private song in the evening followed by the frog’s call all night long.
We all sort of breathe a collective sigh of relief when we land up north in the cabin, leaving behind the gameboys and the TV, change into bathing suits and hit the beach for a day of relaxation and play.

So where does the dichotomy come in?

Somewhere pretty close by is a military base where they run routine practice runs and I always always forget about this until I hear the jets flying overhead and the practice shots. This year, for an exciting change of pace, we got to experience the house-shaking effects of live bombs being dropped – over and over. Let me tell you – there is nothing to jar you out of utopia than feeling like you are living in the middle of a war zone! I’m a pacifist by nature so the practice air raids also remind me of the thing I detest most in life – war, violence, unnecessary death. I resent the interruption to my peace and escape.

Thankfully this doesn’t go on all day, every day. Just occasionally. Enough to remind me there is no real Utopia. Life just keeps going on.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 10:44 am and is filed under Holidays & Vacations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.