What a goofy self-portrait. I should have turned around so that the ocean was behind me. Walking the boardwalk in Halifax in the spare hour I had in Halifax last week during sales conference, I felt like quite the tourist. Beautiful scenery. Exceptionally touristy shops littering the non-ocean side of the walk, I bought a sweatshirt that says, “Halifax,” and a baseball cap because I forgot to pack one, and revelled for a moment, in being away.
Halifax is a lovely city. We ate well, worked hard, and despite looking like a vacation anyone who has experienced a publishing sales conference knows that’s not exactly true. Five days away from my family was a shock to the system. Like jumping in a cold lake. You know it’s good for you just to take the plunge but you aren’t exactly prepared for either the water or swim.
I got homesick. I mean really, desperately, inexplicably homesick by around the second day. The RRBB was teething, horribly, and that made it all worse. I think travelling would be so hard with the boy the age he is now, his eating so sporadic, his sleep the same, and mine even worse. But the scenery was so refreshingly different from what I look at every day. 
Lighthouses, boats, the sights and sounds of the ocean, the smell of the salt, the heaviness of it on your skin when the wind blows and it’s a little rainy outside. All of it combined into something akin to a holiday–even if we were working the entire time.
Feeling a little lost without them, I wandered around outside every chance I could get. The sea calls you, I know it sounds cheesy, but there’s a quietude that comes over you when you just stand silently and look out at the water. I can only imagine how much more intense it gets if you’re on a boat (seasickness aside).
The food was fantastic. Lots of seafood. I ate a lobster for the first time (it wasn’t really for me). Really nice restaurants. I met a friend for a beer, which was also lovely. And I slept, sort of, without worrying about whether or not RRBB was going to wake up, whether or not I’d hear him, however weighed down by knowing he wasn’t feeling well. Separation anxiety is supposed to wane by his age, almost 22 months. But the weekend I got back from Halifax, every time I left his sight he’d cry, a lot. And by Monday, when I dropped him off at daycare, he was a complete and utter puddle. Tears dropping on the floor. The teacher said, “What’s wrong, you never cry like this?” I like to imagine it’s because he’s so attached to me but maybe it was just the shock of his routine coming back again after a week of Daddy, toothaches and watching Mighty Machines as a special treat.
I read a book in one sitting for the first time in ages, an almost managed to finish another on the plane ride home. Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season is a refreshing call back to the thrillers of the early 90s in a sense. The heroine isn’t a lawyer or a damaged hard-edged cop with something to prove. She’s a single mom trying to figure out her life when a dead body shows up on the plantation she manages. Her family history mixes with the politics of land ownership and as she unravels the truth, it becomes ever-so apparent that history tends to repeat itself. It was a terrific novel, and I enjoyed it immensely. I have no idea what number that is in terms of my reading (I’m calling it #47 and I’ll try to catch up).
The other book I read while I was away was James Meek’s latest novel, The Heart Broke In, and it’s incredible. Truly comparable to The Corrections, it’s an epic of family proportions. I loved this book–the characters, their quest for happiness, how morality and justice and self-deception fuel some truly questionable decisions, and the aftereffects of our society’s breakdown in terms of values–what it means to be a truly good person–he takes all of this on in a narrative that blissfully hums along. All of a sudden you’ve read 500+ pages and feel like a moment has just gone by.
So, that was my week away. It was punctuated when I got back by a terrible stomach virus that lead to a trip to Emergency because my chest was so sore–it’s all sorted now, but I have spent the last week or so wishing that I could just go seven days without incident like those reports they put up in factories. You know?