Week Off

What's a seagull doing 100 miles inland on the edge of the White Mountains? Answer: Looking for bites of your Monkey Bread. Maybe bites of you. The Monkey Bread was what our girl Annie made over the weekend, along with the ribs, the mashed potatoes, the poached salmon, the crème anglaise, the special berries, the chocolate cake and on and on. You wouldn’t call it camp cooking exactly; you wouldn’t call it Vacation Fun For Annie either but what’re you gonna do with a chef in the family, lock her out of the kitchen? Tell her she can’t use her creative gifts? What cads would do that to a daughter?She brought that sugary bread out on the dock yesterday where Old Dave and I were hanging out, resting our bones and watching Those Born Well After Us jump in the water and swim out to the raft. Some nosed around in kayaks, though I wasn’t one of them. Some kept an eye on the noisy renters drinking their brains out two docks over. I was one of them; I love the way people don't realize how far their voices carry over water.This was our family who at day’s end packed up and were gone, leaving Pops and me to patrol for tiny life-jackets and brood upon the fate of the red-ant nest under the big pine. “But won’t you be bored up here all by yourselves?” asked one right as he was leaving.Bored? When we have each other, and Scuttle, and the rest of Annie’s cooking? It’s our one little five-day vacation. I think we'll find a way to fill the time!