Wrapping Up Our Vacation Quotes

You are teaching your living, breathing, made-in-the-Image-of-God students. The resources are there to help you do that. It's that simple, we just forget when we get all wrapped up in "getting through" all the math lessons before the end of May, or finishing every science experiment in the book before we call it good and move on. It doesn't really matter how far in the book we get. What matters is what happens in the mind and heart of our student, and for that matter- in ourselves. You know this. I know this. But we've got to start living it. We are all spinning our wheels because we're frantically trying to "get through" published curriculum as if turning the last page in the book by the beginning of summer vacation will somehow mean that our children learned something. Truth is, they do learn something from that. But it's not at all the message we want them to internalize. We are teaching people, not books. We need to understand the limitations of curriculum. We need to stop trying to make it something that it's not, expecting it to yield what it was never intended to deliver.

When his support team on the surface finally called down to him on September 14, the day his experiment was scheduled to wrap up, it was only August 20 in his journal. He thought only a month had gone by. His experience of time’s passage had compressed by a factor of two. Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

No one is completely defined by their knowledge or what they've accomplished. At the end of each of our lives, if you ask the people who knew us what they'll miss the most, it'll be the small ways we loved the people around us. It'll be the memories we made and the big mess-ups we walked through together. It will be our kindness, not our qualifications, that outlast us. It will be the time we unsuccessfully tried to wrap a puppy up for Christmas, not the perfect vacation we planned or the raise we got. It will be the fire we started by mistake in the house while trying to make indoor s'mores during a storm. We won't be missed because of the lectures we gave or arguments we won. We'll be missed because someone will want to call us to share a joy from the day and remember we're no longer there to share the celebration.

St-Joseph-Du-Moine and Chéticamp in Cape Breton are awash with natural beauty. Little else is as powerful and moving as its setting sun, the particular scent of the ocean, or the mountains wrapped in multi-coloured fabric. Some who grow up here tend to remain, raising their families, generation after generation. Those who don’t want to leave but must to find work, often yearn to come home, returning for the occasional weekend, a few weeks’ vacation, to summer homes, or to retire in order to satisfy their yearning to stay connected to their roots and to the land. This place lures outsiders too; they come to witness the landscape or even to make their homes in our Acadian niche. In my novel, Laura’s Story, Laura leaves the village as a young girl, but as she grows older, she longs for her home and feels a distinct pull to reconnect to her native village of Chéticamp. What is it about home that holds us there or beckons us to return?

He tips his glass and drinks. So does Matt. And everyone in the crowd. Except me. “What’s wrong?” Matt asks. “Nothing,” I say. I motion my mother forward, and she puts a box in my hands. It’s small, but it’s weighty at the same time. “I have a present for you.” “I thought our honeymoon was our present to each other,” he reminds me with a scowl. We’re leaving for the Carolina coast for a week with the kids tonight. I can’t wait. I motion for him to take my package. “The vacation is our gift. This is just extra.” I blink back the tears that are already forming in my eyes. He makes a face and opens up the box. He looks inside and then gets confused. He pulls the tiny little item out of the box. It’s a onesie that has tattoo designs all over it, and on the back, it has the name Reed. “What’s this?” he asks, confused. Then his eyes grow wide. Friday gasps when she realizes what’s going on, and the rest of the crowd rumbles and fidgets. “Is this…?” he asks. He stops, because he’s choked with emotion. “Yes,” I say. Tears roll down my face, and I don’t care. I lean close to him. “You knocked me up.” He takes me in his arms and pulls me close, and a sob rolls through him. “Are you serious?” “Completely serious, Matt,” I say. “But wait.” I look down and shake the onesie out. A second one falls out, and Matt catches it in the air. “Two?” he asks. I nod, so broken by his reaction that I can’t speak. “Two tiny little heartbeats,” I say as soon as I can. “Holy fuck,” he breathes into my ear. He squeezes me so tightly that I chirp. “I love you so fucking much,” he says to me. He takes a second to breathe me in and compose himself, then he drops to his knees and lays his forehead on my belly. He says something quietly to his unborn children, and I’m not even sure what it was, but I do know it was between him and them. Or him and God. I’m not sure which. Then he stands and looks up at the crowd. Half of them are as teary-eyed as we are. “Do you know what this means?” he asks our friends and family. They rumble, but he can’t hear one voice over another. He points to Logan. “This means my sperm are better swimmers than yours, little brother!” he says. He signs while he talks, and Logan flips him off. But he’s laughing. He wraps his arms around Emily and lays his hands on the small swell of her belly. I slap his shoulder. “What if it’s my eggs that are amazing and not your sperm?” “What if it’s just us?” he asks quietly, and he kisses me. “Us together.” “I told you I believe in miracles, Matt,” I say when I can finally lift my head. “You’re my miracle,” he says. “You. Just you.

We buried Paolo with his sex bunny at the foot of a tree in the backyard, where they lie wrapped in an endless embrace in their Mexican serape. For weeks, Lucy looked like she was about to sob. Our home felt empty without that cat; we were palpably down a man. It was a wet, gray winter and it passed slowly with very little daylight. — PERIODICALLY, LUCY WOULD STILL seem drunk. I heard her entering the house while I was taking a shower one afternoon, and I came out wrapped in a yellow towel, excited to see her. But I took one look and saw that it wasn’t really her. There was a blurriness in her eyes, a vacated twist to her facial expression. I felt the floor turn to water under my feet. Lucy had vanished, and in her place someone furtive and messy was telling me things that didn’t add up. Sometimes her speech would be slurred, but usually it was subtle. Something would just be…off. Then a terrible queasiness would slither through me and come out of my mouth in different ways. Sometimes fearful, sad, pleading: “Honey, have you been drinking?” Sometimes unhinged, abject: “I can’t take this anymore.” Sometimes icy, condemning, ruthless: “You’re the worst,” I said once, and meant it. (To my best friend in the world. To the person I had slept next to on a thousand naked nights, I said, You’re the worst.)