Vacation

I have never been very good at vacation. I am not a planner, so any vacation that requires planning is dependent on someone else doing it and including me. I am from a big, close family and I moved from where my family is centered over twenty years ago, so most vacation time from work and holidays go to seeing them and catching up with old friends from that part of the US. I can think of very few memorable vacations.
This year is very different. My future wife and I purchased an old school in the countryside of her home country four years ago. I have never had a real vacation home before. As I wrote in previous entries, we spent a lot of time and effort this spring getting married a few times. I knew last winter that this would be a summer of transition, so I planned six weeks at the country house. This house is really a project, with a lot done, but a lot still to do. But this is the first summer that it has enough infrastructures to stay in for an extended period of time. It required a ton of work from us, family members from her family, neighbors, craftsmen and others. For the past two weekends we felt confident enough to invite friends to visit or in some cases stay with us. We hosted seven different friends and family visits or stays over the last week and a half.
We worked our butts off (really, my wife’s butt is gone) on the house. The location if the house is quite rural, so pushing nature back required me sacrificing my body to the insect world. I am pretty sure I have encephalitis and limes disease combined. My guests this weekend came back from a smoking break laughing and shared with me that the thought of a New Yorker in this countryside is hysterically funny to them. It occurred to me that I am living in a close to Green Acres world (New Yorker, Eastern European wife, Mr. Haney, Ralph and Alph, the whole woks. I am having the best vacation of my life.