Every Little While

I don’t know how others feel, but I’m this way: when my canoes or snowshoes get dust on them (when I’ve been away for too many months), I get a certain itchy feeling. It’s a kind of small-of-the-back tension. Only another trip north can assuage it. I’ve got to get back into the World of Living Things. It takes about three days to start to relax, to change over to the different rythmes of living on the Land. Everything after that is bonus. To come out on the third day is a kind of a cheat, like licking only one blade of the beater that’s just whipped the icing.
You never really have the time free, you just have to take it. You never really have the money either, you just have to spend it. And each trip is just familiar enough, and yet new and different enough, to whisper at you later, at home in the south “Come away and wander once again….”

Every Little While     ©1998 Dave Hadfield

Every little while, we need to get away,
Trade the daily grind, for living day to day.
And there just to the north of us, where the highway ends,
Lies a land that whispers to us, takes your hand just like a friend:
“Come away and wander once again.”

Chorus

And at first, you know what you’re missing.
Though in time you tend to forget.
Very soon, you’re busy with living,
And you see it end with regret.

“Haven’t got the time,” the commonest refrain.
A dollar or a dime, the pace is still the same.
And though we try to get ahead, we hardly ever do.
And when you see the wild country,
Stretching out in front of you,
Something happens to your point of view.

[chorus – instrumental]

Far away it lies – it’s difficult to share.
A most elusive prize, and worth the journey there.
And though you travel often it is never quite the same.
And though it often seems as if it’s more than just game,
The journey always makes you glad you came.
And though it often seems as if it’s more than just a game,
The journey always makes you glad you came.

©1998 by Dave Hadfield

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