The idea was to row the rubber boat to the other side of the pond, lay the oars down and drift. The wind was up on this last day of vacation, pushing small waves diagonally across the water in steady, perfect formation. It made paddling against the current difficult.

        You notice different things in a week spent at the edge of a pond: The size of a swan's feet. The colors the sun paints the water at the end of the afternoon. The way the birds fly (ducks low, gulls high), and the voices that carry across the water like stones endlessly skimming.

        The work needed to paddle against the wind. You feel that. The ease earned when you've reached the other side. You feel that, too. It feels like contentment.

Seven days to relax

        We work too much in this country, at least compared with the rest of the world. The average American gets two weeks off. He takes a week of that in drips. A three-day weekend here, a stress day there. What's left is one week. Seven days of running around, going crazy trying to relax.

        One day in the rubber boat, I saw two little girls practicing ballet on a dock, in perfect tandem. They could have been swans. I rowed back to the house, where I toasted their innocence and also the sun, as it slid into a bed of clouds in the early, post-dinnertime evening, igniting them in red and pink pastels. I saw my children, 11 and 15, age before my eyes.

        I remember my grandfather, who launched himself at vacations like a rocket to the moon. It wasn't a vacation if he wasn't blitzing from one photo op to the next, so when someone asked him what he did on his trip, he could whip out 500 Kodak moments.

        Me, I like to drift.

        “A seagull?” My wife noticed him one day, soaring above the pond. “I thought they liked saltwater.”

        “They like garbage dumps,” I said.

        “Surrounded by saltwater,” she said.

Life to its essentials

        And so it went. Pleasantly, purposely mindless. Three times in four years, we have returned to this place, a two-bedroom house on a kettle pond, formed many millennia ago by some cataclysmic event that dug a two-mile square hole in the ground 60 feet deep and filled it with cool, clear water. They're all over Cape Cod, these kettle ponds, turquoise thumbprints made for our amusement and contemplation.

        I like this place. I like how it trims life down to its essentials: Swim or sit, read or sleep. Where to eat. What do we do if it rains?

        I like the sway of the boat in the little waves. I like, on the frequent, blue-perfect days, to row to the other shore, where there's a little red house that's always empty. I like to see myself in that house, spending my summers watching my family and the sunset.

        A week of vacation is only enough to remind you what you're missing. It's the taste of wine from the sommelier. One of these days, I will pour myself a month's vacation, the way the French do it, the way the Germans do it.

        Work gives meaning to our lives. Work is what we do. It can be who we are. Without lots of work, drifting on a kettle pond would not be so wonderful. This is why the idle rich are so often bored and unhappy.

        The other 50 weeks are for rowing into the wind. This week is for the other side of the pond, where the breeze is at your back. It's not enough, this one week of helpful wind. But it's what we've got.

        The wind pushed the rubber boat back to where it came. I let it. I had a book and some binoculars and a cold drink. I forgot they were there. In the blue sky above, a gull soared on an updraft. Drifting. The only sound was the lapping of the little waves.

        E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.

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