a little coffee

Ha! Completely forget what I said about “relaxing” and “refreshing.”

I had a marvelous jacuzzi last night… got all pink-faced and noodley.  Was sooooo ready to just melt into bed. And then.  And then.  The quiet.  The silence.  Once the TV was off there was absolutely no noise except the occasional creak of the building and my mother’s snore.  All I could hear with vivid clarity.  Give me sirens!  Give me car horns!  Give me the dull chatter of people passing under the window!  Not this black silence!  And I do mean BLACK.  Around 1AM, restless and annoyed, I took a little walk around the condo peaked out the rear window- and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. My gut burbled with that visceral fear I felt watching the Neverending Story when I was a kid.  Something about The Nothing thourghly weirded me out, rendering me incapable of watching that movie again, or even thinking about it without heart palpitations.  And here I witnessed it!

It took a couple more hours of kicking and pillow punching, but I managed to doze . Woke up and dozed some more until my parents started poking me and saying “Rise and shine Sleeping Beauty.”  I struggled to sit up and shot them death stares.

The day was annoyingly bright and cheery and we set out on our adventure- to visit the artsy community an hour away on Lake Superior named Bayfield.

We whizzed by tiny towns and converted barns and a large number of mom and pop coffee shops. And stopped at what I suspect are the only two stoplights in the county- and they were for construction purposes.

Finally, we arrived.  After lunch and a couple hours of dodging into shops and grabbing ice cream, I was disappointed in this town.  Sure, it’s a cute, seaside town. Very New England-looking.  And it was relaxing to stroll down, and then sit, by the pier watching the boats. But when I hear “artist community” my mind conjures streets filled with artist studios and their shops.  From pottery, to jewelry making, to paintings to quilting.  In Bayfield, most of that was confined in the town’s artists co-op, The Artist’s Guild, where we discovered this wonderful artist, Denise Koch. She manned the co-op, tinkering behind the counter, wearing a black moo-mooish dress, sans bra, her silver hair wavy around her ears. “She’s a painting herself!” my artist-mother excitedly whispered to me after snapping a picture of Denise posed by her art. 

Besides the co-op there were the local restaurants, several candy and ice cream shop and the requisite touristy shops selling gaudy t-shirts and mugs. The towns’ offerings were slim if you weren’t inclined to do anything in a boat. 

I don;t know how my dad managed to do it- not steal any one of the sea kayaks that were casually left atop people’s cars.  I could easily have stowed away in one of the myriad of boats left docked on the pier. Maybe they will take me to China???