H. and I enjoyed a short getaway last week: two nights and three days in the Chilliwack area, at the Fraser River’s Edge B & B, about an hour-and-a-half away. We filled up on a gorgeous view of the river, the warm hospitality (with full pandemic protocols), delicious breakfasts, and restful ambience of the lodge. If the continuing Covid season made a change of scene seem urgent, it also made this particular spot possible, for, as co-owner Adriana told us, they’re normally fully booked by out-of-country guests who come for fishing adventures.

We let the other two couples at the lodge wrestle with fish (a nine foot sturgeon, we heard, which beat the humans after more than an hour’s effort) while we explored the river’s edge, Chilliwack Mountain, and the Vedder River trail; bought and ate the best corn of the summer from a local stand; and found my grandparents graves in the Chilliwack cemetery. We’d roamed about in that cemetery some years ago, looking without finding, but this time I’d phoned ahead to get the exact location, and thus we successfully completed the earlier quest.

I wondered later what suddenly compelled us to find somewhere else to go, what besides trying to plug the sad hole a visit to our Toronto children would have filled in other times. I remembered efforts we sometimes made when newly married to get out and do things on weekends, when we would just as soon have stayed home after a week of work. Partially at least, I think, it was to prove to colleagues Monday morning that we too “had a life.” (Lingering shades of high school, I suppose.) The need to impress about socializing is past, but perhaps a remnant of that effort had emerged now in reference to ourselves. Maybe we needed to prove to ourselves that, in spite of the strangeness affecting us all, we still have a life. To prove that we could still — sort of — get away.

P.S. When we returned, nourished by Away, our balcony petunias were overflowing their planter banks in welcome!