There's No Vacation from Life

"Chilling at the Beach" by Parvez Taj

About a week ago the temperature dipped to minus 18 degrees at our house. And not just at our house but in our whole neighborhood, in the surrounding towns and pretty much the whole state of Maine, staying that way for a few days. Finding the situation untenable, my husband and I flew to Florida for a week.

It was indeed warmer there, but the news of the 7.5 earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria, killing 25,000 people in one fell swoop, reached us there as well. The fact that we could lie on a beach in bathing suits and play outside in shorts and needed to apply sunblock every few hours didn't change how many people lay trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings in another part of the world. 

In fact, it didn't change anything. We watched Joe Biden shout his State of the Union speech in our hotel room with the roar of the surf right outside, but his blatant lies were no different than if we were hearing them back home with snow three feet deep in our backyard. Now we are back home where it's still cold outside, and reports of the latest "high-altitude object" that entered our airspace over Alaska and downed by the U.S. military is just as unsettling as if we were learning of it while working on a tan and sipping a frosty iced drink with a little paper umbrella in it.

What vacations actually do change is the amount of money in your bank account. And of course you have all those photos to post on Instagram.