New Buffalo

Photoscribbles

School’s out and what a liberation for children. Ascension conclusion and what feels like freedom.

Parents have this ever present and imagined cloud overhead and a yoke on their shoulders, but even that may be put aside on the right day in the right setting, and so New Buffalo it is.

A beach within reach.

An amenable time change and with no vacation days we still trot to Saturday ugly Indiana gridlock traffic to a celebration entering Michigan.

Ah the yearn to breathe free and we forgot to bring the sand toys but found three shovels and stacks of hotel cups to amuse two long and leggy junior high students who could never keep their pant hems dry and their hands out of everything, so we wind them up and let them go.

Separate individual humans from us. No danger, no barking. No clock and no mind.

Fancy kids, dirty kids, sleepy kids.

I’m a kid too, stretched out in the toe abiding sunshine stretch. Cold white caps and biting into a legend.

Green olives on everything. A brine theme, a great lake pirate stepping out of the way of the Rolls Royce in the parking lot and plenty of fancy unwind to lake life, distillery, spa music, sailboats, and shore sand all scattered on the bathroom floor.

Cuddling the beats of love and tenderness.

A weekend spent well with honest sheckles and a Monday morning shower at 6:15 AM, a carafe of coffee with the big bonus bursting on the slither back out of Michigan, back through hot early congestion, back to a desk by the time the morning whistle blew.

The secret to New Buffalo is that you coherently gain back an hour of life in your reverie blinking. Eastern Standard Time. Chicago in our shoulders. A very easy pack job and the school’s out liberation that’s contagious to old laborers who still need an exhale somewhere windswept and beseeching.

Summer just beginning and the sand imprinting heart shores, all bare feet and breaking waves with a family away from demands, requests, input, jealousy and dark responsibility for everyone else’s happiness. No, we leave that here where the shut-ins spin and the daily drudge drags a hound dog face to pavement and duty.

Let’s grab that school’s out spirit and wring it out, cold sparkling and rinsing, on the sand shores of moments. Moments captured, cracked and crazy compassioned

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