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Fall is a busy time for Jewish holidays. This week marks Sukkot, during which we're supposed to build a rickety outdoor shelter called a sukkah to mimic our time of wandering in the desert. The custom is to invite people over and pray, eat and sing in there. It's a nice excuse to party outside, weather permitting.

I'm not handy enough to build anything, nor domestically skilled enough to cook, so I pretty much ignore this particular commandment unless I'm the invitee. I'm more than happy to go to somebody ELSE'S sukkah and eat THEIR food.

Every year, a San Francisco-based religious organization called Be'chol LaShon holds a Sukkot retreat in a remote area of the northern California mountains. This is an organization specifically for Jews of color, and since (1) I wouldn't have to build anything because they were erecting the structure for us, and (2) Bakersfield isn't exactly teaming with Jews--of any race--I decided my black Jewish family should go.

There is no air fare money in the single mom budget, so my 7-year-old daughter K and 4-year-old son J made the trip by car, leaving late in the afternoon so my second grader wouldn't miss school Friday.

It's six hours in a straight shot. Factoring in San Francisco weekday traffic, two child bladders and my ability to get lost in a closet, more like seven. Adding isolated, windy country roads in pitch black darkness and no cell phone signal, maybe eight. In despair, it occurred to me that I had taken the whole wandering Jew thing far too literally. At one point we were being circled by vultures, and I wondered if we would just keep driving 'till we ran out of gas and starved to death.

Finally we found ourselves in Petaluma (pop. 54,000) and stumbled into--Hallelujah!--a police station. A kind but very busy dispatcher's eyes widened when I told her my destination. I was, it seemed, pretty far off course. She apologized and told me she was juggling four simultaneous 911 calls so I'd have to wait, but she would help me as soon as she could. Almost a half hour later (who knew such a small town had so much crime? I guess Friday night is Friday night anywhere) the dispatcher tried to Mapquest some directions for me, but she didn't like the route it chose and turned instead to the super duper cop computer for an alternate course.

Still another half hour later, my exhausted children and I arrived at the retreat compound. It was nearly midnight and needless to say, registration/check in was closed. I had no idea which cabin was ours, and didn't think it would go over well if I went door to door waking people up to find someone in charge.

The kids were asleep, anyway, and we had blankets. I figured we could sleep in the car.

At precisely that moment, J threw up in the back seat. The 4-year-old woke up to find himself covered in vomit in a cold car surrounded by dark woods, and began to wail at the top of his lungs. That, in turn, woke my 7-year-old, who yawned and said. "I have to use the bathroom. What's that smell?"

I flew out of the car to whisk J out of his safety seat because he was clearly about to blow again, and seconds later he was wretching in the parking lot. K, meanwhile, was narrating like Howard Cosell: "Mommy, he's coughing. He's hiccoping. He's throwing up again. It's EVERYWHERE!  Euwwww!!!" This, narration, by the way, is all offered as K is doing a potty dance, the kind that indicates close proximity to an emergency.

J is still crying and now shivering because the wind is whipping at his cold, vomit-soaked clothes, and K is crying because she "really, really, really" needs to use the bathroom.

I scanned the campus and identified what looked like the most official of the buildings. One that might contain an administrative office of some sort. I warned K that it was likely to be locked, but we would try it before squatting behind a bush in the cold. I put my hand on the handle and pushed, and I swear I heard angel wings and harp music playing as it easily swung open. OPEN!!!

We made a bee-line to the bathroom, where I stripped J naked and washed his foul, putrid clothes in the sink, then dunked my son in another sink for a paper towel sponge bath. By this time he had stopped howling. I think he was too traumatized and nauseus to give further voice to his horror.

We had sleeping bags in the trunk, so I spread them out on the floor of what I soon discovered was a community dining hall, and that's where we spent the first night of the retreat. A member of the kitchen staff arrived about 5:30 a.m. to prepare breakfast, but he came in by another entrance so he didn't see us. Lest I scare the poor man half out of his mind, I knocked on the kitchen door and announced myself. The cook shook his head in disbelief and asked why I hadn't called someone. I held up my lame cell phone. "No signal up here," I said, and he nodded knowingly. He had no way to know which cabin was ours, but it would be locked, anyway, and he didn't have a key to the residences. He did have a key to another building where registration would eventually re-open, though. Crash there, he said. It has couches.

Hours later we were shown to our primitive lodge (which had a toilet and sink but no shower) and directed to the "bath house," a building with a dozen or so shower stalls, not one of which had hot water. The organizers of the retreat were all volunteers with day jobs, and alarmed Jewish mothers took one look at my still very green son and tracked down a retreat staffer who in real life was a physician. Fleetingly I thought, "Great. I meet a single, black Jewish doctor at a religious retreat, and it's a female."

J wasn't motion sick from the roller coaster drive, she declared. Probably a 24-hour bug. He won't eat for a day or two, which is fine as long as he has lots of fluids.

I released K to camp counselors charged with entertaining the 6 years old and up crowd so grownups could commune with G-d in peace, but J had to be quarantined from the preschool programming. It's a measure of how sick he was that he spent the entire weekend tucked under a blanket in a stroller, and didn't once complain or attempt an escape.

In fact, the only time J perked up was when a raccoon slipped into our cabin to steal our toothpaste. The purposeful critter went straight to the bathroom and was in and out with his loot in seconds, so I'm pretty sure he was a repeat offender who had honed his strategy from previous raids.

I might have been tempted to feel sorry for myself, except that one of the retreat sessions was about being "present in the moment." That is, not getting so caught up in your routine that you can't see G-d all around you. Two of the people sharing in our discussion circle had just lost their fathers, and talked about spirituality in the context of grieving.

After that, I started to see beauty everywhere I looked. The breathtaking mountain vistas. The deer, skunks and foxes who boldly walked among the cabins after dark. The couples staring adoringly into each other's eyes. The grateful hugs and kisses from my daughter, who was having the time of her life doing arts and crafts, sports and canoeing  with Jewish children born in or descended from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. There was Brazilian dance, African drumming and yoga. There was food, and music, and of course, a sukkah.

And there was peace.

But for my son's illness, I wouldn't change a thing.

Have a good Sukkot, if you're celebrating.

Shalom.