We slipped away (all four of us!) for five days at the cabin on the river we so love.

There was time for books and knitting, foraging and medicine making, board games and boat rides. What a glorious week! Like so many of you, we’ve had a few heartbreaking cancellations this past season, from a long-awaited Boundary Waters trip to a return visit we were just imagining to the coast of Maine when COVID crashed our last-summer-of-homeschooling-two party.

And Lupine bore the biggest hit of all, with a postponed international trip with a group of teens to visit a mutual friend oversees.

And so we pivot. We pull ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and take stock. And we make other plans.

We packed the cooler, gassed up our rusty old pick up truck, and headed to the Northwoods, to a place we know so well. My family’s cabin and the river that we love.

To reset and regroup in the forest.

There were plunges into racing waters and wild medicine to forage; mushrooms to delight in discovering and remedies to craft.

And, of course, long and much needed sleeps to savor.

In short: it was just the thing this 4 months-and-counting quarantined family needed.

On the way home, we took a detour past an organic blueberry farm I stumbled upon last year, masked up, and picked our fill before heading back to the welcoming arms of these hills.

No, life doesn’t look like it did last summer, and yes, there have been losses. But how grateful I am for the small pockets of normalcy, magic, and joy that we may still savor during these trying days.