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Raindrops create symmetric patterns on the placid creek outside my deck while cool air drifts up from the water, caressing the perspiration lingering on my forehead. Summer teases with all forms of green bursting forth, and deer and other critters rush past my view through the pine and oak canopy, as if laughing at the lack of people. Even the birds at my window seem not to care that I’m sitting mere feet away.
I’m watching the splendid scene unfold from my enveloping porch chair while sipping some high-falutin Napa wine sent to me as thanks for an article I wrote for an airline magazine.
Life couldn’t be better.
So why am I crying?
When the call came, I didn’t think of my husband and two children when I agreed to this adventure. I ignored their pleas, grabbed my laptop and notes, piled into my Toyota Prius I named Old Betty II (yes, there was an Old Betty I), and headed south. I didn’t even consider their feelings as I fled our little houseboat, once a haven of love but over the past fifteen months a four-person collection of misery.
“Can’t I come with you?” TB had implored me as I pulled my suitcase from the storage closet.
It’s a common question in my household and pretty much every person I call friend. When you’re a travel writer and invited to fun and exotic places on what we call press trips, to the rest of the world it sounds like a dream vacation. All expenses paid. Occasionally luxury accommodations and great dining options. Exciting attractions, meeting awesome people. From the outside, it appears I’ve won the vacation lottery. In reality, press trips are work, from dawn to late night visiting places, interviewing people, posting to social media, photographing everything in sight, and then writing blogs, print stories, and website articles.
I know what you’re thinking, it’s still a dream job. Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.
But, I can’t bring husband, kids, family members, or friends…fill in the blank. Tourism people are not going to spend good money on people who don’t produce said items above.
And yet, those family members and friends always ask.
“No, you can’t come,” I told my dear husband, and I wish I could report that it was delivered in a nice way.
“It’s not a press trip,” TB insisted, moving between me and my suitcase. “This is different. They’re just housing you while you work. You said it yourself, there’s a bedroom and a pull-out couch.”
Me and my big mouth. “That doesn’t mean we can all fit.”
He leaned his tall frame against the bureau, arms crossed across his chest. “We can have the bed and the kids can sleep on the couch.”
I grabbed my ditty bag and peered inside. Toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, and conditioner.
And a cat! Even Stinky, my beloved cat, wanted to come.
“It’s a tight cabin, and I have to work.” I pulled my ginger feline out of the suitcase and placed him on the floor at my feet. He meowed in defiance. “And no pets allowed.”
“It’s only a few hours away,” TB implored. “Maybe we can visit.”
I sighed and threw my stack of underwear into the suitcase, which spilled over into the socks section. I’m a stickler for packing well and that only made me tenser. “It’s several hours away.”
“Vi….”
“TB!”
The bedroom door flew open and our youngest tween—by only a couple of minutes since he’s a twin—took one look at the suitcase and his eyes enlarged like quarters.
“Mom’s leaving,” Michael yelled. “I wanna go!”
Gaia was hot on his heels, gazing at me, then the suitcase, then me again. “No way. You’re abandoning us.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed as the three of them discussed my departure. I should have snuck away while they binged-watched Disney+. Instead, I had to endure the accusations flying fast and furious: “I can’t believe you’re leaving us in a pandemic.” “How am I going to Zoom classes without you?” “You can’t leave me here with my brother.”
I adore my family, but I work from home and they won’t leave me alone. It’s difficult making family respect work-life boundaries, and no matter how much we love them, sometimes you must retreat to an insanely quiet cabin surrounded by woods. Besides, said cabin happens to be the story I’m writing about!
I held up a hand and sent my family the mommy eye and they quieted down. “I’m not abandoning you. I just got a plum assignment that will help keep us in streaming TV, not to mention food, and my client needs it right away. They’re putting me up at this remote cabin so not only can I work at the property I’m writing about but I can get out of this house and work uninterrupted.”
I leave out the part about my hesitation regarding the location. If it wasn’t for the COVID-19 pandemic and being shut up with my family for months, I would have politely turned them down.
“We’ll be better,” TB said quickly. “Right, kids?”
“Right,” I replied, but it’s not an acknowledgement. Everyone ignored my sarcasm.
“We’ll behave.” Michael gazed up at me with his bright eyes that turns my heart to mush.
“Yes, we will,” Gaia echoed sternly, my daughter who inherited my tough side.
I shook my head. “It’s two weeks, y’all. Not two years.” I think about the delicious solitude and quickly add, “Maybe three.”
“Three?” TB gasped.
“It’s the Florida Panhandle, not the moon.”
They all stared at me, each about to utter a “But….” Instead, it was me shaking my head. “If you want to keep eating, I need to make this deadline.”
Gaia threw her hands in the air. “Fine, abandon us.” And with that, she headed back to her Secrets of Sulphur Springs episode. Michael paused, unsure of what to do, but when he heard a bag of chips being torn open, he headed to the living room and arguments ensued. Soon there was a rumble like a small earthquake, and Michael yelped. Then an intensely bright light filled our little houseboat and TB and I reeled backwards.
“Mom,” Gaia shouted. “Michael’s using his powers again.”
“Mom,” Michael yelled. “She’s doing it too.”
TB grimaced, leaned in close. “Please don’t leave me alone with them.”
For a moment, I almost acquiesced. My husband and son share unique supernatural qualities, due to an angelic ancestor, but they veer toward goodness and light, while my daughter inherited my witchy DNA and hasn’t quite mastered the “do no harm” aspect. She’s also way too smart for her own good, and seldom has patience for the men in our household who have difficulty keeping up with her overachieving brain.
Now that my kids are both approaching eleven and beginning to ignore their parents as many adolescents love to do, they occasionally use their talents towards each other—and sometimes in public! Most of the residents of Emma’s Cove, Tennessee, where we live in our small houseboat, know about our quirky little family but not our neighbors in the larger town of Lightning Bug—not to mention the bigger world. And we’d like to keep it that way.
I sometimes feel like a referee keeping our family’s game in motion. But after months of whistle blowing while cooped up in the Boudreaux household, I’m ready to throw in the uniform and get the hell out of Dodge. Or the NFL. Or whatever. Man, I hate mixed metaphors, even if they’re in my own head.
“Camp Hiawatha needs this information right away,” I said to myself as much as to my husband, throwing the last of my clothes into the suitcase and zipping it up, not caring that it was a mess. “I know it’s only to update their website and meet their marketing deadline so they can advertise for the summer now that they’re back open. But, it’s good money and we need it. You know the work’s never going to happen around the three of y’all, not to mention that I’ll be at the camp doing all this work.”
TB’s job as librarian at the Lightning Bug Library shifted to part-time early last year when everything and everyone went into lockdown, and he’s still waiting for his hours to return. Naturally, the library closed, so TB performed administrative work, such as arranging curbside book pickups and updating projects long neglected. He helped homeschool the kids during the day, since schools were closed as well.
My adolescent twins did the obligatory zoom sessions and homework, but mostly lounged around watching Netflix and Disney+, eating everything in sight, and fighting loudly between themselves. Meanwhile, I worked feverishly trying to meet the deadlines of my freelance workload that had doubled during the pandemic. The only peace I found was in the early mornings when the three of them slept in, hardly enough time to get my stories done.
So, when Paige Bellweather called and mentioned how my old summer camp finally got the approval to open in June, and how she needed content to spread the news immediately, I couldn’t pack fast enough.
I rolled my suitcase onto the floor, grabbed my purse and jacket, that bottle of wine from Napa, and headed for the door. Stinky howled in my wake. I don’t think I said goodbye.
“This is ridiculous,” I mutter before gulping down my wine and wiping my eyes with the back of my sleeve.
The truth is, it’s only been three hours and I miss them already.
The rain picks up and temperatures drop, the humid breeze slipping beneath the balcony railing and up my pant legs. I shiver, cross my ankles, and pull my sweater tight across my shoulders. I let out a loud sigh—enough to scare the deer—and take another long sip of my wine. I grab the pile of historical materials Paige had left me on the cabin’s kitchen table.
There’s not much written about my old summer girls camp. And everything I knew about Camp Secret Spring was gleaned from my summer there at age fourteen. Counselors taught us its unique history: that a group of entrepreneurs arrived from “up north” in the early 1900s to start a utopian society called Emerson and that it was located near a spring that supported their agricultural experiments. The spring led into Murder Creek, so-called for the demise of a prominent soldier by the hands of renegades in the 1700s. We campers used to joke that those Massachusetts folks who settled here would write home, “I found the most beautiful spot in Florida by Murder Creek! Y’all come.”
Okay, maybe they wouldn’t say y’all.
The original town of Emerson built by those Massachusetts peeps consisted of a meeting hall where the communal government operated and meals were served, a school house, small houses for the residents, and a cemetery. The latter was too full for a town of that size, in my recollection, something else we joked about. “Guess it wasn’t utopia after all” we would say and laugh, reading the many tombstones.
What can I say? We were insensitive teenagers and not very funny.
I look over the stack, which is surprisingly small. The Internet offered the usual information—two hundred people arrived to start the rural town, the townspeople built their own buildings, a “progressive intellect” was hired to teach the children, and they supported themselves through farming and fishing. Some folks designed pottery to sell and marked the unique pieces with the name of the town and the creator’s initials—that from an Ebay sale. By the mid-1920s, Emerson ceased to exist and pretty much all mentions chalk it up to socialism not working and the residents going broke. One small excerpt in the back of an old book about Florida history says that the residents moved away after an “incident.”
I stare out at Murder Creek from my second-floor perch; the cabins are built on stilts in case the creek rises. The rain eases up and a sliver of moonlight appears, dancing on the water’s edge as if winking at me through the trees. Now that the rain has ceased and dark descends, the night turns deadly quiet on Murder Creek—pun intended. I guess the birds and deer and other critters have headed off to bed. Tomorrow I have research to accomplish, first to discover what happened to Emerson. Nothing like a hole in historical documentation to make my journalist mind rev into high gear.
“Yoohoo,” a voice calls out and I imitate a cartoon character jumping from my seat. Through my pounding heartbeat, I hear the footsteps on the outdoor stairs leading up to my cabin. I gingerly turn the corner of the porch to see who’s surprising me with a visit, wishing I had a weapon handy, although I hardly think someone wishing me harm would start with “Yoohoo.”
“I didn’t scare you, did I?” Paige asks, her arms full of something that smells heavenly. I think to say that she frightened me into gray hair but I’m too busy focusing on that smell. I’m so hungry and, in my flight from Tennessee, forgot to stop at the grocery. That wine, as delicious as it may be, hit my empty stomach like a rock down an empty well.
“I brought you Pad Thai,” she mumbles from behind her pandemic mask. “Hope that’s okay.”
Hallelujah. “It’s my favorite. How’d you know?”
She laughs and it sounds like tiny wind chimes in a breeze. “I would say it’s my psychic ability but I asked your husband.”
I grab the liter of Diet Dr. Pepper in her hands—thank you, TB—and remove the top box from her pile, trying to remain a safe distance since I’m maskless. I sniff it and sigh, hope it’s spring rolls, wonder if she included that amazing peanut sauce they serve in Asian restaurants. Paige enters the porch and we place everything on the picnic table.
“Would you rather eat inside?” I ask. “It’s so nice out here. I’ve had both of my COVID vaccines and passed my two-week period so I’m good. But, it’s still better to be outside.”
“Absolutely,” Paige says, removing her mask. “I’ve had mine as well so we should be okay together but still, can’t be too safe these days. I’ll move the chairs apart.”
“I’ll get silverware, plates, and glasses.”
I head inside the sliding glass doors that lead to the living room, a small seating area with a couch that feeds into the kitchen. It’s an open floor plan until the hallway that heads back to the bedroom with a bathroom off to the left. The furniture resembles something bought at furniture warehouse stores: bulky, heavily varnished, extra-wide chairs. Some pieces, such as the bed frame and the couch, feature arms and legs imitating logs, to go with that woodsy cabin feeling. I call it faux forest, since the wood’s likely fabricated material.
There’s nothing fancy about these rustic cabins built for visiting parents when camp is in session and to rent out to tourists the rest of the year. Cheap and rugged holds up nicely to traffic. Paige had explained, when she had called to offer me the job, that the cabins would bring in extra money to help pay the camp mortgage in the off-season.
I had answered, “I’ll bet lots of tourists will want to spend nights in the Florida pine forests and paddle Murder Creek, many of whom will live to tell the tale.”
I chuckled. Yes, I make myself laugh. Paige didn’t respond.
I grab two tall glasses and fill them both with ice. Opening the fridge, I see that Paige has filled it with a variety of condiments and everything I could want for breakfast: eggs, milk, orange juice, sausage, and fresh croissants in a cute little bag with “Missy’s” written on the side. I suspect the pastries were baked locally by Missy the baker. Out of curiosity, I check the pantry. Yep, more food, including my favorite, Paul Newman’s organic Newman-Os that resemble Oreos but without the guilt. And yes, I realize the calories are likely the same but whatever?
“You are too sweet,” I tell Paige as I return to the porch with a tray of plates, silverware, two glasses of water, and an extra wine glass. “And bless TB for letting you in on my secret cravings.”
Paige rises and takes the tray from my hands, again keeping her distance. “He’s a doll. We must have talked for twenty minutes.”
I wonder for a second if TB asked to come, but my husband knows better. Still….
“TB didn’t ask if he could have a cabin, ...
