It’s spring-tease season in Vermont. Last week, 60-degree sunshine reintroduced us to our lawn and swelled our river, rumbling with snowmelt and runoff. Today, the wood stove is cranking again, and there are snowglobe flurries swirling outside my bedroom window.

My husband came into the kitchen while I was making pancake batter. I hugged him tightly and wouldn’t let go.

“You need to stay off the internet today,” he said.

My daughter’s eleventh year has been jam-packed with milestones. With each one, I try not to think too long about all the things that have slowly fallen by the wayside the past few years. But it’s also been a time of recovering things that had been set-aside during parenting’s heavy lifting years.

New Jersey is my embarrassing cousin. The one who talks too loud, who fake jabs at my head and gives me noogies when I get too close. Who always knows someone who knows someone. Who insists there’s only one right way to do something (everything else is bullshit).

Come in close. I have something to tell you that I’d like to keep just between us: I don’t love camping anymore.

Yesterday was a stellar weather day: cloudless and 70s, breezy and bursting with birdsong and the greenest greenery of early summer. I played hooky, tagging along with my “summers-off” husband to a mountain biking area we hadn’t been to in over a decade.