One of my clergy colleagues in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas is the Rev. Sarah Condon, who is also a contributor to the Mockingbird blog. Last month she posted a reflection there entitled “Summer Vacay: Where Is Mom’s Coffin?” Believe me, it’s worth taking a few minutes to read that little gem about the ritual of summer vacations with the family. As she says at the end of that reflection:

. . . no matter how much we expect out of vacations (or any other sort of escapism for that matter), we are still very much the same people we are at home. We may transport ourselves to some beachy locale, but we will still carry our neuroses right along with us. Family getaways offer this rare opportunity to accept that fact; not only about ourselves, but about those people we love most in this world.

One thing often said about Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is that there were no villains and no heroes. That claim, in a nutshell, is a family vacation. We pile into a vehicle, take our turns acting like jackwagons, and hopefully, learn to accept one another all over again.

So I think that we should write haiku about summer vacations, which can indeed be occasions of grace. Here’s mine:

On the road again,
both annoyed and annoying —
loved and loving, too.

Now it’s your turn. The rules are simple: Use five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line.