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For years my friend Karen has been inviting us to come up to her cabin in the U.P. and we finally took her up on the offer. After we arrived it took Miika about 48 hours to stop whining about boredom and the fear of bears and wolves. The remedy? A bag of peanuts and a fishing pole. The addiction to the white buzz of our urban home faded into the discovery of new little friends: baby bass at her toes and chipmunks taking peanuts from her fingers. After hours of communing with woodland pals, the hum of trains, Harleys, air conditioners, traffic, TV and playground buddies stopped tugging at her soul.

On day two, Karen presented me with a 3″ X 2″ piece of plywood and asked me, “If you’d like to paint or whatever the paints and brushes are in the garage along with stacks of magazines.” While taking in the woods, the lake, and quiet, I snipped, glued, painted, smeared and pondered. The novelty of skipping rocks in the lake and letting fish weave around their feet, kept Miika and Nathan content for an entire afternoon so I could work on a collage. What a dream…

Here’s what happened to the board:

Journal entry on day five:

I’m sitting among majestic pines watching the sun rise on the lake to a chorus of chickadees, nuthatches, chipmunks, crows and a distant loon. The day we arrived, we went across the road to pick wild red raspberries and discovered three pilated woodpeckers 2o yards away hammering at an old, rotted, buggy log. They were so busy that they practically ignored us while we filled the bottom of our bucket with berries.

We arrived in temperatures warm enough to enjoy a swim in the lake, but two nights of rain have delivered a cold snap that requires two sweatshirts to keep from shivering. It’s perfect weather for fishing which is what Miika and Paul have been doing for the past few days. Nathan goes back and forth between the deck where I’ve been painting and the lake, happy as a clam.

Yesterday we drove down to Eagle River and just happened to glance over at the Ace Hardware parking lot at the right moment to catch a glimpse of a bald eagle soaring low. Jaws dropped and hearts grinned. On the drive back to the cabin we spotted a small flock of wild turkeys and multiple ravens. So far, despite all the deer we’ve seen in the woods near the road, they’ve stayed out of the van’s path.

The primal lure of a bonfire kept Miika and Nathan up way past their bedtime last night. Finally after I dragged them in, put them to bed and sat down to read, the woods started to chatter and yip with countless canine voices. The black lab-pit bull mix next door couldn’t contain herself and barked the coyotes away deep into the forest.

As I sit here writing, I’ve made the acquaintance of a chipmunk who is quite comfortable pulling peanuts out of my shoelaces. The fifth nut has just been snatched and stashed away in his secret burrow under the steps that lead to the lake.

I’m dreading our return to the urban drone of ding-ding-ding, beep-beep, grrrr, humm. Perhaps I’ll wash a few dishes by hand back home while I look out the window beyond my Sesame-Street-like scene to the memory of a lake with a pair of loons accompanied by the whooshhhh of wind in the pines. I’ll be back Chippy….with peanuts on my shoe.

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