You might have suspected, given the radio silence, that the Owl flew off on a bender this weekend. So very true. Except the Owl’s bender was five days without phone or internet service in a tiny (okay, actually HUGE) piece of nature in the middle of the Adirondacks. Friends are members of a wonderful member-only hunting and fishing club near Old Forge, which we get to visit every year as their guests. It’s rustic, it’s the “middle of nowhere” and it’s delicious.

You can guess that the teenage owlets complain, as they do every year, about no snapchat, no youtube, no texting, no TV, no netflix, no whatever. And then after a few hours, they find the dock to leap off of, the kayaks for island exploration, the friends that they actually talk LIVE with, a walk in the woods discovering strange new fungi, leaping off swimmer’s rock and jumping into icy water from the falls, after walking the trail that someone gets lost on every.single.year. And games of cards, backgammon, Sorry, afternoons of reading books in the nook, hours at the firepit. Too much wine possibly for the adults. We wash it out with the morning swim at 7 am from the dock.

And we reconnect with the closest of friends–who we met in São Paulo and now live in Newton, and we talk in and out of two languages, two countries, and many months of separation. My gratitude: being off-grid.