Last Thursday and Friday I asked off from work so I could have a long weekend. But I didn’t plan to go to the beach or Disney World or St. Augustine or anywhere at all. No, I planned to stay home (with my cats and my flowers) the entire time.

Some of my coworkers were skeptical.

“Oh, but you don’t understand,” I said, laughing. “This is my dream vacation!”

And it didn’t disappoint me, not a bit.

On Wednesday evening, I sat on the front porch and watched the sun set over my beds of woodland sunflowers. I waved to my neighbor Doretha, who was sitting on her front porch, and, as we often do, we had a shouted conversation across the surprisingly busy street that runs between our two big front yards like a river. As usual, neither of us could quite hear what the other was saying, but it didn’t matter. Shouting back and forth across the street in a friendly fashion is always a pleasant ritual.

Doretha’s front walk is lined on both sides by wide, sun-drenched boxwood hedges, which she often uses for clothes-drying. The hedges are cut into long rectangles, so the clothes can lie on top nice and flat. Doretha’s house is so pretty, with a deep, shady porch and trim painted sky-blue. I love that her house, surrounded by woods, is part of the view from my own porch.

Oh, I had lots of fun on my days off. And it was wonderfully slow, unexciting fun—my favorite kind.

Everything I did, I did as inefficiently as possible. For example, when I carried out the trash, I took the scenic route to the garbage can. I walked around the whole house just so I could enjoy the ferns, banana spiders, trumpetflowers, and lemony pools of sunlight along the way.

There’s a line from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town that I’d been thinking about in the days leading up to my staycation: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it … every, every minute?”

What I wanted to do over my long weekend was try to realize life, to slow down and appreciate it. So I watched birds in the backyard and fed watermelon to the box turtles that roam in our old vegetable garden. I played with my cat Carl as he rolled and curled (so cutely!) on the rug in the bedroom and made bunny paws. I picked pears, sun-warmed and snowy white inside, and I tried not to fret about the future or the past but to focus on now, sweet now.

Glorious sun on the south side of the yard

My bunny shrine on the breezeway

This bench is one of my favorite things. I bought it when I was young, and it took me a long time to save up for it.

I always end up feeling sorry for my garden statues and bringing them inside.