The point of a proper vacation, at least according to that part of my brain that compares everything to childhood, is to be somewhere else entirely for a little while. You should go away to a temporary place, a place where you do not normally live, and you should spend enough time there that you really want to go home afterwards and get back to your routine.

I am currently in that temporary place. I have a bed, and food, and a little apartment that has all the necessary things, including a narrow and unsuitable kitchen, a cramped dining room, and a living room furnished with weary furniture and horrid seascapes. There are the necessary tiny bedrooms with stiff beds. White railings abound outside. A ceiling fan rocks and spins overhead while I sit on a quiet porch, listening to a solitary fish crow make unflattering remarks at the chirping sparrows. I have slept adequately in a bed that does not belong to me and which, unlike my bed, wiggles slightly when I turn over. My brain is aware that I am not at home, and it’s aware of pretty much nothing else at the moment.

Best of all, I am in the correct geographic locale for a vacation, which is to say I’m in the beach town I have visited at least once a year since I was a baby.

Yesterday, after our little family (my adult child, my son-in-law, the six year old grandson) dumped our things in our temporary home, I took the grandchild off for a walk to the blocks of little shops that have always been there, and then we met up with my kid and walked down to the beach. The grandchild ran back and forth, up and down, shrieking at the touch of the water, and I did nothing. I stood there. Periodically, the waves flung themselves up over my jeans cuffs, and deposited sand in the folds.

I thought about nothing, not even about the ocean, not about the little boy with vulnerable ribs, the soft tummy, and the swimming shorts slung around his narrow hips, not about the vast sky and the parasailers off in the distance. I am away. I am Not At Home.