Oh my friends, what a majestic country this is.  I'm just back from four and a half days of silence and space - trees, sky, water.  These are Canadian necessities that every summer should provide, but without a cottage, I usually don't find them.  

A friend rented us a cabin near Killarney Park, south of Sudbury - we were in a tiny place with a sprinkling of cockroaches, a leaky ceiling and a million dollar view.  It was hard to drag me away from my perch on the big rock in front of the cabin overlooking Georgian Bay, but we hiked and/or canoed every day - lungs full of sweet fresh air, eyes flooded with green.  The hikes were so solitary that if we found a nice lake, and as you can imagine there were a few, we'd take off our clothes and swim.  We saw dangerous wildlife only on our last morning - four giant black bears, happily ripping apart garbage bags at the town dump.

And best of all, when it rained, we were not in a tent, we had a roof, electricity, an indoor toilet and hot running water.  Bliss!  Oh the memories of camping in that very park with small children in the rain - one time when there was a near- hurricane, I drove the kids over to the bathrooms and they simply slept in the car.  But no, this time, just us, grown-ups who liked to read when it was pouring outside, as it was often often often, during this summer of rain. Today, driving back, was a downpour of biblical proportions - we needed an ark.

I had a chance to finish "Eat, Pray, Love" -  several friends have dismissed the book, but I was engaged all the way through.  She has a marvellously alive and honest voice, and I enjoyed her journey.  I also read a book called "The Writer's Chapbook" - a compendium of snippets about various facets of the writing life by a stellar assembly of writers.  I was sitting in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, listening to a gathering of the world's greatest writers talk about our craft.  I think they would have enjoyed the view, too.