Remember that feeling when you were eleven years old and you built a fort out of couch cushions in the living room, had a sleepover with two or three of your best pals, ate greasy pizza and maybe a big scoop of chocolate ice cream, and got to crawl into that little cave of haphazardly fastened sheets and cushions, into your warm sleeping bag, and went to sleep in a big ol’ hug of rust-colored corduroy-cushioned comfort?
That’s how I feel almost every night that I go to sleep in Junebug. Yes, there’s the stress of everything else that an adult gets to burden — money, health, the occasional feeling of unfamiliarity — but I never grow tired of that incredibly enveloped feeling each night when I climb into bed, into my safe little Junebug, with a beloved kitten on either side of me as I read my Kindle and eventually unplug my little overhead strand of LED lights from the USB port, and my brain tunes into the sounds of hundreds–thousands?–of night-chirping crickets, frogs, cicadas, and other unknowns of the night from my slightly cracked window. And then I sleep.
The rhythm of life, the routine of it all, is such a protective blanket for so many people. I fall prey to it, too. My life before July was fairly predictable, though I’d try to mix it up on occasion with trips to the mountains, unchartered 8-mile day hikes through the Smokies, weekend excursions to new bicycle paths to ride my Raleigh amongst the unknown.
Before Junebug, my typical work day was to get up around 6, get a workout in at the gym or pool in my fancy little Carillon apartment, put out all day for clients — creative this and that, less-creative this-and-that sometimes — and end my day around 4:30 or 5. Power off the MacBook for the night, pour a cold glass of Chardonnay, consider a dinner of salad or veggie wraps, power on the boob tube to scroll through a whole lotta nuthin’, pour a second glass of Chard. Reconsider dinner — pizza!! — and ease into the evening.
Now, my workday is a little bit different: get up around 6:30 or 7, go for a walk and feed the campground bunnies (they love blueberries, the leafy part of romaine but not the crunchy hearts, and of course, carrots — they hate asparagus stalks and unnecessary bell pepper clippings), decide if I want to shower in Junebug’s beautiful-but-water-pressure-less bathroom OR in the nearby campground bathroom (which has grand water pressure but not-so-grand everything else), and fire up the laptop for a day of creative. Creative which is influenced greatly by my surroundings, and makes me a better designer. And at the end of the day — and oftentimes, in between projects — I stand up, walk outside, and venture to the lake to say hello to the multiple turtles and fish who live there, drop my resident campsite bun-bun a few leafs of romaine and a blueberry, and by day’s end, pour that ever-so-valued glass of Chardonnay — this time, with grilled vegetables and a side of nature.
But what’s to say the “known” is any less of a quality of life than the one I am experiencing right now — this “unknown?” I choose to explore because for me, exploration and new places and people [and bunnies?] and discovered undiscoverables is MY level of comfort and happiness. Well, maybe not comfort, but for sure, happiness.
TravelswithJunebug 