Skip to main content

Camping On The Farm

I promised to reach A's farm before sunset so we could scout for a place to pitch our tent. This was supposed to be practice for J so she could enjoy the "real" camping trip to the beach we have planned a few weeks out. Dusk was gathering by when I made it armed with comforter, pillows and a cheesecake for dessert. The cheesecake detour cost me a precious half hour of sunlight and we never got to it with all the food A had cooked.

The moment I parked, the dogs leaped in and aimed for J in the car seat. The kid screamed her lungs out in fright as A struggled to get Wheezy and Meister to control their emotions upon seeing their buddy J after a while. W and M retired indoors shortly protesting copiously in their wake. J stepped out semi-paralyzed from the shock of the welcome - all her excitement about coming to the farm evaporated.

By when we were ready to sleep in the tent under the starlit sky J was singing and laughing with delight. A had warned me that the bugs would be loud - she had seriously understated. The citronella candles did not do their thing either. We were too lazy to get up and look for bug spray. J was the only one who got a good night's sleep.

Daybreak was utterly peaceful. The bugs had fallen silent at last. A and J were still asleep when I went out for a walk in the woods. After a while I could not see the farm anymore. I stood surrounded by trees, fallen leaves, wild lichen and mushroom. Sunlight was still bleak. Other than the sound of my foot steps all was quiet. For the briefest moment in many years, I felt disconnected from the sum total of everything that makes up my life. It was a wonderful feeling.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more