I am reporting from the gleaming village of East Orleans on the Atlantic side of Cape Cod -- what a gentleman in plain ordinary Orleans described to me, when I asked him for directions yesterday a half-dozen miles and social strata down the road, as "The  Republic of East Orleans."

He was right. Our hosts, Jamie and Sarah, were lucky to have this property fall into their familial lap. Years ago it might have been affordable by the masses. Today, land values are so high, they enjoy it only by sharing it with Jamie's brother and sister, at the generosity of his retired oral surgeon father. And even then, they must rent the place out to strangers in the summer to break even.

Jamie loves the place because he has spent every vacation of his life here. Sarah loves it, too, but wishes they could occasionally vacation somewhere else just once, the way Rachel and I do every year. This place is hard work, and by being so beautiful and demanding, and having to pierce a thicket of family expectations, it eliminates the option of going somewhere else.

How to describe the place. They live in a  beautiful but not "luxurious" three bedroom house built around 1900, up on a cliff overlooking a salt-water inlet, a vast expanse of desert dune, and beyond that, the purling waters of the endless salty sea. I am told the house faces Ireland, but I am so turned around by Cape Cod street geography that it could as easily face Patagonia.

It is, in short, breathtaking, setting aside for the moment the herd of two-inch long Junebugs clinging to the dew-speckled screen doors this morning, like salesmen who refuse to take no for an answer.

And I, as usual on vacations, am moved to reassess why I hate leaving home so.

The French use the same word, vacance and vacance, for a refreshing trip and an empty hotel room. I know what they are getting at, that a proper vacation vacates one, that it empties one out, like a spring cleaning of the dust-bunny ravaged soul. That is the linguistic explanation.

But I believe it has to do with physics. I married an enthusiastic woman, and when I did that, my own natural enthusiasm necessarily waned, so as to keep our relationship in balance, and our quadrant of the universe from breaking off and spinning away on a cosmic IPO.

Every year Rachel proposes some grand, inexpensive adventure -- to New Orleans, to Seattle, to Colorado, Winnipeg, or this year, to New England. (One year she found a way to get the family all the way to Hawaii on a sockful of nickels and dimes. It involved six weeks labor on a Liberian freighter.)

And every year I resist. Not in the honest, direct, "I won't do it" way a person could admire for its forthrightness. More in a sneaky, foot-dragging, "I'll do it but you'll be sorry you asked me" sort of way, that no one can admire because it is the essence of malicious compliance.

And oh how I fret. I run a small copywriting business, and I am afraid that if I leave, my business will go to hell. This was a better excuse in years past than this year, as my business has already gone to hell.

But the main reason is that I am afraid of something happening. Something good. It knocks you off center to stand on a mountain top in Franconia Notch overlooking the Robert Frost ancestral home in the valley below, along with the staggering bluffs and runaway forests that give these mountains movement.

From the highway you imagine a placid climb. Only when you plant first foot on the tangle of deciduous roots and granite stumbling-blocks paving your path to the summit, X-thousand faltering steps ahead of you, do you realize what you have bitten off. Or rather, what your beloved has bitten off on your behalf.

But the air is so bright up there, and the clouds so fleeting as they dance from crest to crest, that you are forced to wonder why Robert Frost -- and you, as his curmudgeonly proxy on this trip -- are such stone-skeletoned jerks.

Reluctantly, Rachel, because concessions consume energy, and because I must admit I have been wrong again, I tip my mountaineer's cap to you, my friend.

From the heart of Cape Cod, and the more craven heart that maintains this feeble thumping sound beside you, now vacant and sanitized as a motel bathroom, I send my greetings, my apology, and my love.