Comfy in Nautica

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Last weekend, four of us rented a car, ditched our routines, and took off for Wolfeboro Falls, New Hampshire. After spending almost an hour stuck in Manhattan's Friday evening rush hour traffic, driving through Connecticut (the most nondescript state I've ever seen) and Massachusetts took us about five hours, with a couple stops here and there. Adam is a tall guy and so, naturally, his entire family is tall and they live in a gigantic house, on an expansive slab of land, overlooking a gigantic lake surrounded by gigantic trees. As soon as we arrived, his parents started feeding us and then they never stopped.

And in the morning, the strangest thing happened: nothing woke me up. I could feel at ease in all that quietude, even when we spotted bats playing in front of the porch one night. I'd much rather go rural than deal with a trifling city. But all that space in between sounds, all that driving along empty strips in a car just made everything I arrived back to on Sunday night -- my smelly city, dumpy apartment, fire escape perch, sliver of a view -- seem oddly refreshing.