Well, I made it home again from my retreat, but it was a near thing. There was a tiny bit of snow on the drive up; day two it rained; day three there was extreme wind (with the chance of us losing power; and day four we had snow added to the wind. One of the major highways was closed both ways due to accidents, but fortunately it was not the route I’d planned on taking. However, driving conditions were abysmal on the route I did take and I only narrowly missed getting caught up in delays by two other accidents along the way.
Obviously I made it home, but it was not without a price. The sinus cold I’d been fighting off before the retreat got its hooks in my head and chest and turned into the mother of all colds/flus. This kind of sent all my determination and good intentions packing last week and other than popping cold pills and babysitting (granddaughter also had a major cold so we were quite the pair) I didn’t do much of anything.
Did you know the only difference between a cold and the flu is that the flu comes with a fever? All this years I thought the flu was a stomach virus, but apparently a stomach virus is just that, not the flu. Someone forgot to send me a memo when that changed. Just like I never got the memo that instead of coughing/sneezing into your hand you’re supposed to sneeze into the crook of your elbow. Just suddenly one day everyone was doing it that way and I’m like, “what are you doing?”
The retreat itself was a lot of fun and I got a lot of writing done, although mostly short stuff from the workshop prompts. There were 15 of us in a big old manor house that overlooked Lake Simcoe. It was kind of interesting watching the frozen lake fill up with ice fisherman during the day, and then the lights from the snow mobiles when night started to fall.
The house is owned and administered to by a group of nuns, which accounted for its well stocked library of religious tomes and the insanely narrow, hard beds we had to sleep on. Being a house, not a hotel, we had to provide our own food and we were divided into groups to make lunches and suppers. There were a handful of food sensitivities in the group, and one vegetarian, and only one meal that had meat – a lunch that consisted of soup and sandwich fixings. You should have seen how fast that meat disappeared!
It was a good group – from a young screen writer to a research doctor writing her memoir. There were a couple of others writing life-based stories, a couple writing non-fiction, a few writing fiction, and the rest just writing.
All in all, I’d do it again. Maybe not in winter though. And next time I definitely want a room of my own. :-)
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