watch the patchwork farms, slow fade into the ocean's arms

I'm sitting on the porch of my grandmother's house, down at the lake, swinging on the porch swing and thinking about nothing much at all. It's not the best hour for me to be awake, but I obviously am.

(Being awake from 8PM to 10PM is totally normal, and being awake from 10-12 is fairly respectable. But 12-2 is a bit more iffy, quite a bit more sketchy, and anything past that is fairly well inappropriate. I'm past the respectable hours and wading well into inappropriate, though not of my own choice.)

Being at my grandmother's this year has been 'real nice', as they'd say round here.

(I slip into the cadences of slightly-grammatically-incorrect speech like I grew up in it. People round here say ain't, and comin', and fixin' to, and do what? I know I live practically in the country at home, but there's evidently a hell of a difference between "practically" and totally.)

Everyone seems much more calm and enjoyable when we're at Grandma's.

We go swimming every day. I say swimming, but the lake's real shallow at our end, so it's more like "standing." We take Teyla down to the lake with us, but she usually stays on the shore. She digs in the sand, fights with the waves, and we laugh. Sometimes we pick her up and walk her out to the buoys. Sometimes we pick her up and walk her out and then let her go—she swims for shore like a labrador.

Sometimes one of my parents joins us—my mom digs out her swimsuit, & slathers on ten metric tons of sunblock—my dad puts down one of the library books he's borrowed from me and takes off his shirt & wades in, or just stands on the shore and flings frisbees towards us all.

I'm not sure if it's the fact that we're on vacation, or just that we're forced to interact with each other and so we learn that making the effort's worth it after all. I wonder, if we stretched ourselves past the comfortable confines of computers, engaged in actual activities on occasion—I want to say that maybe we'd be able to capture this comraderie, this sense of real community, real family.

I want to say that, but I'm not so sure it's true. Tomorrow, I know the first thing everyone will do when we get home—after turning on the air conditioning, and going to the bathroom, et cetera—will be to turn on the computers and sit down, never to stir for the rest of the night—week—life.