Last day at the cottage

Well. That's the week over, then.

Seven days in a rented cottage by a lake, during which the sun appeared for a total of roughly four hours. I have counted. One does, when there's little else on.

I'd like to say we made the best of it, and I suppose we did, in a modest sort of way. There was a canoe. The canoe was used precisely once, on the Tuesday, by my brother-in-law, who returned twenty minutes later considerably wetter than he had set off and declined to discuss the matter further. Fair enough.

The remainder of the week was cards. An unreasonable quantity of cards. My mother-in-law, who maintains that she isn't competitive, had been keeping score on the back of a shop receipt and produced it, unprompted, on the final evening. She had won. Comfortably. Nobody was surprised, though several of us managed to look it.

The children were feral and perfectly content, which I've come to understand are the same condition. They spent Thursday building something out of driftwood down by the water. It fell down. They built it again. I watched from the kitchen window with a coffee and thought that this was very probably the entire point of the exercise, though I didn't say so aloud, as that isn't really done.

Right. The cottage has been swept, the fridge emptied, and the key returned to its tin by the door.

Not bad, actually. Not bad at all.

On this day...

On this day in 1875, Carl Jung was born — a man who spent a good deal of his life concerned with what goes on beneath the surface, and who eventually built himself a stone tower by a lake in which to think about it. Seven days in a damp rented cottage would appear to be a rather cheaper version of the same idea.

Homework

Before you unpack, write down the three things from this week you'd want the children to remember. Not the photographs. The other things.