Away for the weekend

Hello.  We went away for the weekend.  It was lovely.  We hung out.  No Internet, just the trees and the water and the rain.  I built a big roaring fire and wished I’d brought marshmallows to roast.  Don made a delicious dinner while Will and I played dominoes (we think, as neither one of us are clear on the rules.)  It wasn’t a full domino set, more like a mini stocking stuffer kind.  Don offered me a glass of red wine.  “It’s really good,“ he said.  So I accepted even though I wasn’t really in a wine mood.  It was good though.  I alternated sips with tiny nibbles of chocolate and felt truly decadent. 

Then in the night, the wind blew the clouds away and we woke to clear skies with only a few clouds and and the air crisp, cold beautiful.

I don’t know why, but there was something about the quality of the air that reminded me of when we lived on Texada Island.  There was this one tree right outside the front porch that had the largest, crunchiest, juiciest, sweetest apples I ever tasted.  And sometimes I’d shimmy up the apple tree in the fall and pluck a ripe apple off a far reaching branch that other people hadn’t been able to reach because the branch was too small.  But I could.  And sometimes if I was super hungry and in a greedy-I-don’t-want-to-share-it mood, I’d eat it, freezing my butt off up there in the tree, so I could have it all.  The thing I liked about this particular tree, more than even the crunchiness and taste, was that the apples were really hard, so that they rarely were plagued with the worms that sometimes infested the softer apples.  It was usually pretty safe to eat one of those enormous King apples, even in the dark, and not have your mouth filled with the bitter taste of…yuck.

It was a lovely weekend.  With talk and cuddles and reading and more talking and dogs digging holes and rolling in stuff that they shouldn’t.  One of those weekends where life seems like it just couldn’t get any better.  Not only that, I made crepes this morning and filled them with a delicious blueberry compote that I made from this summers store of frozen blueberries.  I added a dollop of vodka for flavor (which I know sounds weird since everybody says vodka doesn’t have flavor, but I find that a glug of vodka or a glug of apricot brandy in one’s blueberry compote adds that extra little something that is missing if you don’t.  Not much.  Around the amount of cough syrup one might take for a cold.  No more than that.  Then squeeze a little lemon juice in, a sprinkling of sugar and you have yourself some blueberry compote.  I added whipped cream and it was good. 

And now we’re back home, which is nice as well.  I wonder what next week will bring? 

Posted by Meg Tilly on Sunday, January 20, 2008 in Chewing the Fat