Recharging

So I'm late (yet again) with my post here, but at least this time I have a passable excuse: I was up at the cottage we rent every year, on the shore of the lake where I grew up, a few hours north of the place we now live.

That's an actual photo of "my" lake, above, taken on one of my early morning walks along the beach. I don't get up there as often as I'd like to, but when I do, the effect is always the same. Forget expensive spas and treatments--all I have to do is take my shoes off and walk barefoot on the sand, and stand five minutes in the water looking out to the horizon, and I'm instantly recharged.

A lot of this has to do with memory. The wind in the trees at the lake has the right sound, the sound I recall from my childhood, when four tall pines shaded my window and whispered all day and all night, and the birches and maples and mulberry trees made a light-dappled wonderland out of the woods where I played. The stars there at night are in all the right places. I learned how to swim in that lake, and the feel of its water around me still wraps me in comfort.

Each year I come up to the lake feeling tired, like a battery drained all the way down to 'empty', and leave again feeling I'm ready to take on the world and its challenges, and to launch into my writing again with new energy.

Where do you go, when you need to recharge?

(Come back Thursday, for Julie's next post).