Vacations bring time for reflection, happy thoughts
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The first day of vacation always feels like you just woke up from a seven-day nap. You get the feeling on that first work-less Monday that you won the lottery, and you don’t know what to do with your millions. It is a feeling like the kind you don’t experience except once or twice a year.
I had these feelings on Monday morning. The first day of a two week vacation from work. Mornings when waking up early is done because you can and not because it is required. Days where writing doesn’t fall between meetings but between sips of coffee. I love the feeling.
Maybe these high levels of euphoria can only exist during Christmas and New Year’s Day when your office is always closed. Or during the summer months when you feel obligated to take time away from work. Maybe they can’t happen if you don’t have the rest of the year to wait for them.
These are good mornings with good feelings, thinking of good things. Lately, I’ve been thinking about a lot of good things. Time lets you do that if you let it. Sit down and look out a window with nothing but you and the distant sound of the clock radio on top of your microwave. Just sit there and listen.
You’ll think of good things. I always do. Like the time my tata had me call into the local radio’s trading post. He was selling a washing machine and I listed it as a dishwasher. A few minutes later, community members started calling him, asking him to purchase a dishwasher he didn’t have to sell. It was one of the few times I saw him upset in frustration. A few minutes later, we were laughing about the mishap for the rest of the day.
Sitting and listening also gave me time to think of the time that a few us friends went on a road trip through tiny rural communities in southwest New Mexico. We stopped at places where there was only one place to stop and talked to friendly strangers sitting in chairs outside their front doors like they probably do every day, talking and waving to travelers and welcoming them to a place only a few people in the world call home.
On that trip, I tasted a pie for the first time that had an apple and green chile filling and pinon nuts just under the crust. I ordered a…
