by Denise Dykstra
My mom is the best. Here is one example of many why she is amazing.
Spring redecorating is in the air. It’s as if, since we cannot get outside — Winter, please leave for good! To get busy in the gardens and yard work, we might as well get the inside of the house cleaned up and redecorated.
Cabin Fever is a real thing and I have a bad case of it.
I am cheering for the sun streaming in the windows and then muttering about the dirt it reveals. If it snows, I turn into a regular monster where I try to avert my eyes from seeing the white stuff at all costs. I get so tired of the four walls of my house but I also cannot think of a thing to do but stare at those walls and will spring to fully arrive.
My mom, bless her, also has this yearly Cabin Fever ailment. And because of this she has, for quite a few years, planned a “Girl Getaway” around the end of February. It’s a weekend with my mom, sister, sister-in-law and me.
We don’t go far, just down to Shipshewana, Ind. But we are inclined to think that Shipshewana is a magical place and we know it is for sure our happy place.
To make this magical weekend happen, certain steps must be taken. Finding a free weekend for four households is no easy task. Once a weekend is secured, my mom makes a reservation at the only hotel we will stay at (it’s our happy place, remember) and the countdown begins. We have a text message thread with all of us girls and we begin planning our weekend away.
We may or may not have a day then an hour countdown to when we leave.
As we prepare for the trip, we give our homes a critical look over to help us decide what items we may searching for. The items searched for can be very broad in the “I need something for the coffee table to spruce it up” to the randomly mundane “I need kitchen towels and some new washcloths for the bathroom.”
Whatever they may be, we make our lists. I always encourage everyone to take a photo of the spot in the house we are looking to spruce up. Do they listen to my wonderful advice? Not usually. But when I needed to find something for a certain place on my wall, those photos I had taken of the spot surely made the search all the more easier. Maybe the oldest sister did have a brilliant idea (this is the fun part of having my own column, I get to add that little jab!).
Anyhow, we all pile into my suburban on a Friday morning and make a beeline to a coffee place. All the prep for us to get away for a weekend means we are in desperate need of caffeine. When we reach the Indiana state line, we cheer. We spend the entire weekend visiting little shops in and around Shipshewana, eating all the food we can, drinking coffee at our favorite coffee shops and saying things like, “We are really on vacation!”
This year we had my sister’s daughter with us as well, and she had plenty of eye rolls for her crazy aunts, mother and grandmother but overall I think she likes spending all that time with us.
We all stay in the same hotel room and that means that we can share all the things…including the one and only bathroom.
We laugh a lot. We eat so much food we think we are going to burst. And we get to just relax as we talk about things. This year we went to Indiana the weekend it reached that lovely 70-degree mark. At the hotel where we stay, there is an outdoor patio with a fire pit, a bubbling fountain area, the most comfortable outdoor furniture and strings of patio lights all over. This was the first year the temperature was nice enough to enjoy that fire pit area and we were the only ones outside with the entire patio to ourselves. We were able to feel that spring was near as we sat around the warm fire and talked about nothing and everything. It was absolute perfection.
When it’s time to leave for home, we pack that suburban up with all our luggage, grocery supplies, leftover snacks and of course, all our treasures, and drive ever so slowly toward home.
When we arrived home after this trip, it snowed. So I will continue to stand by the fact that Shipshewana is magical.
Once we all are back in our homes and not near each other, our phones begin to ding. This part isn’t as fun being together, but it’s close. The conversations we have as we put up our new finds in our homes and rearrange furniture the way we discussed while gone as well as share all the things that happened to our children while we were gone (this year there was a puking incident with one of the younger kiddos), and we have the most fun texting back and forth.
The week we returned home, I had an evening meeting. When the meeting wrapped up, I had 26 text messages from them. We don’t mess around.
We do nothing extravagant and nothing glamorous, but that little trip to Indiana is our yearly cure for Cabin Fever and it’s a gift my mom gives her girls. I can’t properly portray in words what that little weekend away means to us all, but I can tell you my heart feels full to bursting while I am away with them.
My mom really is the best.
Do you have an annual get away you look forward to every year? I would love for you to tell me about it!
