An Idea

It’s February. Cabin fever has started to pick at me. I’m tired of it. Everyone is. It’s like we’re stuck in the gray, gloomy muck of it, but we’re not. At least we don’t have to be. I have an idea to beat it, but it would take everyone’s cooperation. Everyone would have to help it work.

What if we just packed up the whole northern part of North America and went on vacation?

It wouldn’t be such a big deal. Would it? For the next two weeks any state or Canadian province north of the Mason-Dixon Line could close our doors. We’d batten the hatches and tie everything down—well almost everything, we’d bring our pets with us and our kids, if they promised to behave. We would take our most favorite stuff and head south, south to warmer weather, bluer skies, and people who are smiling. We would become them.

I wouldn’t think a little trip should be so hard to arrange, if we pulled together and made plans for it. We could put a hold on the newspapers. Stop the mail. Leave our keys with the neighboring states and ask them to keep an eye on things—feed the fish; water the plants; do stuff like that. Sure we might have to return the favor sometime, but it would be worth it. Two long weeks in the sparkling sunlight with sandy beaches and palm trees might be just what we need to get hold of our hope again. We might even find a sense of humor and learn to dance and sing again. I know it would do wonders to make me lose sight of my cranky gene.

I can hear the whole country talking about it, “Leave it to the Midwesterners and Canadians to pull a stunt like that and to bring the other northerners along with them.”

Yeah. We’d give them something to talk about. That alone would be worth the trouble of packing, and traveling, and getting back.

That’s my idea. I think we should do it.

Are you in? Or are you sticking with cabin fever until it makes you crack into tiny slivers?

—me strauss Letting me be