I’m going to the mountains next week. My daughter Pearl and granddaughter Maggie and I are driving up to our cabin at the lake, where we will have multi-generational Girl Time and Mountain Time. We’re off the grid up there in the High Sierra, and away from stores, so we have to bring everything we need…

I have never been the one to load a car rack before, and now I need to know how. So I’ve been watching YouTube videos and practicing tying knots, both on a contraption I rigged up with chairs and boxes next to the computer, and on my car itself. I think I am prepared… I know I am pleased with myself that I could learn this knot, because beyond knowing my right from my left pretty well, I am not gifted or intuitive when it comes to visualizing and remembering spatial arrangements.

One thing that added to the fun aspect of my project was running across this music video that doesn’t purport to teach the knot that the singer and I both required, but does capture the emotional tone of my own efforts and made me laugh out loud — and want to dance.

The other fun thing was that after my practice sessions with the old rope, my hands smelled as though I had been camping. 🙂

I have so much to do to get ready, I don’t really have the time to write a blog post about it, but I can’t help myself – and now you know why I’ll be away from Blogland, gone to a place where time will be in abundance. I will probably write, but on paper in notebooks. And we will all sit on the deck reading, I’m sure of that. So I’ll just leave you with a nice quote from Philip Connors, and hope to see you here again next week.

“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”