Do I Have to Leave Town to Have a Vacation?

A Staycation That Didn’t Go as Planned

I took five days off for a staycation.

I even made myself a structure. I was going to write for two hours every day, take care of some practical things, sort through my art area, make progress on the book, and generally use these five glorious days in a thoughtful and productive manner.

My car had a rather different idea of what “staying home” should mean.

Day one: car trouble.

Day two: more car trouble.

Day three: a new battery.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I started moving furniture, because apparently nothing says restful staycation quite like rearranging the house.

Meanwhile, something rather wonderful happened.

My column came out in the newspaper.

There I was, officially in print, and I couldn’t even go and get a copy because my car wouldn’t cooperate.

Eventually the car was running again and I went in search of the paper. The Sonoma Sun is free, which may have been a mistake on their part. I grabbed enough copies that I now look less like a columnist and more like an unofficial newspaper supplier.

And now the staycation is over.

Today is my first day back at work, and I could quite happily do with a few more days.

Mostly because there are still things on my carefully constructed list that remain completely untouched.

The art stuff did not get cleaned out.

The book did not get written.

Ugh.

But here’s the funny thing.

When I looked back over the five days, I had actually accomplished far more than I realized. Some of it was on my original list. Quite a lot of it wasn’t.

There was paperwork. There was the car. There was furniture. There were enough newspapers collected to keep a small village informed. And there were all sorts of other bits and pieces that somehow got done along the way.

So no, I hadn’t exactly followed the itinerary.

But I hadn’t done nothing either.

And then, on the final evening of my staycation, something happened that wasn’t on any list at all.

A friend came over for drinks and appetizers and brought with her one of her oldest and dearest friends, who had just arrived from Hawaii.

And there we were.

Three women, all close in age, sitting around together sharing stories from completely different parts of our lives.

What struck me first was the ease of it. One of these women I had only just met, and yet there was a feeling among the three of us as though we had known one another for much longer.

There was no careful getting-to-know-you conversation. We simply began talking.

And before long we were sharing some of the intimate pieces of our lives — the joyful ones, the complicated ones, the things that had shaped us. It felt completely natural.

There was laughter. There were stories of challenges, unexpected turns, loves and losses. But nobody needed to make any of it prettier than it had been. There was an enthusiasm for all of it — for the lives we had lived and, perhaps even more importantly, for the lives we are still living.

My friend’s friend is a writer too. For years she has written in journals, never imagining that all those pages might one day become a book.

Now she is in the process of making that happen.

She read some of her writing to us.

I shared some of mine.

And somewhere in the middle of that evening, I noticed something.

I wanted more of this.

Not necessarily more appetizers — although I’m certainly not ruling those out.

More of this kind of company.

Women close to my own age who are still interested in life. Women with stories. Women who are curious about what they’ve lived, what they’re living now, and whatever might still be ahead.

None of us wandered off into what I might call the woo-woo. We didn’t need to.

Yet each of us had experienced moments in our lives that, in our own way and with our own language, touched something divine.

Nobody needed to explain it.

Nobody needed anybody else to believe it.

It was simply part of the conversation.

And perhaps that was the real surprise at the end of my staycation.

I began these five days with a list.

Write the book. Sort the art supplies. Take care of paperwork. Get things done.

I ended them with quite a few things still unchecked.

But I also ended them having caught a glimpse of something I had forgotten I was reaching for.

Maybe a vacation isn’t only about getting away from our ordinary lives.

Maybe sometimes it gives us enough room to notice what we’d like to bring back into them.

And I wonder how often we decide whether time was well spent by looking at what we got done, rather than what we noticed while we were living it.

I still want to clean out the art stuff.

And I most definitely still want to write the book.

But today, as I go back to work, there is something else on my list.

More evenings around a table.

More stories.

More laughter.

More curiosity.

More of whatever that was.

Apparently, my staycation did accomplish something after all.

It just wasn’t on the itinerary.

With Love

Bobbie xo