What A Great Weekend That Was

It was the Victoria Day long weekend and so my husband and a good chunk of the men I'm related to went on an arduous, multi-day long canoe/portage trip. And I was left here ALONE with my three increasingly miserable - more on that later - children and my non-driving in our emptied out town for DAYS AND DAYS.

I knew it was going to be awful. How could it not be? My kids had plans which - one by one - fell through and as the weekend went on they became increasingly discouraged and dismayed. And meanwhile, my husband caught a giant pike that came out of the water with searing red gouges on its side. Overhead, an angry hawk EAGLE angrily circled, and the marks showed themselves to be where the mortally wounded pike had wrestled its huge body away from the hawk EAGLE (my husband read this and told me it was an eagle and that there's a big difference between the two. ALL RIGHT.) in the sky, falling to the water where it was caught and wondered at as it gasped and died.

"Becky will put this on her blog!" my dad announced.

My kids started off the weekend sleeping in the schoolroom, and then each night found them closer and closer to my bedroom, until the final night which found my daughters crammed into my bed, radiating waves of heat, and my son sleeping right outside my bedroom door. Everything fell into quiet chaos - meals became disarrayed, unordered, bathtimes fell by the wayside, people fell asleep at random times. And this was not a positive thing, a liberating throwing-off of oppressive shackles, but a first misstep by me that was impossible to correct, a giving-in.

My husband and his fellow insane canoe-ers saw a rotten moose floating in the river, unharnessed from the winter ice. They took pictures - of COURSE they did - and even in the pictures, you can see what drove the moose onto the thin ice, onto its doom. Wolves chased it and it fell and for now it floats in the water, unpleasant to look at and even, I was informed, far more unpleasant to smell.

The kids and I watched the most recent Jackie Chan movie. All in all, it was probably the highlight of my weekend.

"And here's when we camped on Ant Island!" my husband said, showing me all of the pictures of gross dead things and horrifying manly sights when he finally, finally came back. "It looked like a great place to camp and then there they were: ant hills as big as a man. Good thing for us they were friendly." And then he chortled - sunburnt, exhausted - and I laughed, tentatively, like some startled mole brought unexpectedly to light.