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I'm not sure which I like better, the week spent at the cottage, or the coming home from the cottage.

We came home yesterday from our annual holiday on Lake Huron. We've been going to the cottage since Thing 2 was only 18 months old, and it's become a real punctuation mark in our lives; the girls don't remember a summer when we didn't go to the cottage, and I always feel like the pictures I get of the kids there stand as tangible markers to their growing up.

And I do love that week away. Apart from the break from work and routine, I love seamless quality to our days there. We have no tv and no computers, and I get a delicious feeling of being completely out of the loop for that week. I usually buy a newspaper every couple of days, just so I know what day it is. And I read and nap and walk and watch movies with impunity; there are no closets to be cleaned, no files to organize, no bathrooms to paint and no laundry to be folded. It is guilt-free, enforced relaxation.

Coming home is just as wonderful. By the end of the week up there, I am dying for my own kitchen, my own bathroom and my own bed. I revel in being able to watch the news, pet the cat and have the dishwasher do the work. (My God, the dishes at the cottage! Every time I'd clear the sink out, it would fill up again in about 3 minutes! Who knew four people could use so many forks??? I come home with an entirely new appreciation for the 19th century housewife.)

This year I did something so wonderfully brilliant that I think I should get some sort of award for it....I cleaned the house thoroughly and perfectly before I went away. (That also had a lot to do with the fact that we had someone housesitting for us , and nothing galvanizes me like pride and the idea that she would tell everyone at work what a filthy hovel I enhabit.) I even put clean sheets on my bed and fresh towels in the ensuite. I cannot tell you what a phenomenally excellent feeling it was to walk into a clean house, after a week spent with bugs and sand and a decidedly lackidasical approach to personal hygeine. And to slide into clean sheets after a long, hot shower was possiblly the most blissful experience of my entire life. (And I know from blissful, I've had epidurals.)

Today I am doing laundry (piles and piles and piles of it) and puttering in the garden and surfing the net and generally enjoying putting my life back on again. And maybe I'll clean a closet, just for the novelty of it.