Despite returning from band camp mid-August, I haven’t yet fully unpacked the last bits of sandy gear still stowed in the garage. I was back to work for a week before heading off to Chicago, my favorite city (sorry Detroit, you are a close second). We stayed in a South Loop loft with a view of an Al Capone hangout and a slice of the river and watched “Murder She Wrote” reruns. We visited the Gilded Age Driehaus Museum and the Art Institute for the Gustave Caillebotte exhibit and hosted a happy hour for some of Brandon’s college friends. The highlight was joining the Gallagher family reunion with 50,000 other Oasis fans on a windy, cool evening at Soldier Field.
Then after we got home, we had a few days to do laundry and soothe the cats’ mad feelings and catch up at our respective jobs, and we welcomed Brandon’s family to stay for a few days.
My kiddo’s last year of high school has now started and it will be an autumn of marching band and football games and band competitions and “lasts”. The weather has taken a cool turn so the afternoons are honeyed and the evenings downright crisp. I’m sure we’ll have at least one more return to summer weather before it’s all said and done.
Watching: La Vuelta (last of the cycling Grand Tours for 2025)
Reading: I’m in between books right now after finishing two excellent reads – “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” by Stephen Graham Jones and “Silver Nitrate” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Making: a custom bag charm by request (my kiddo wearing hers around is great advertising), a pair of vanilla socks that I started during band camp, and if you can believe it I still have to finish the Perfect Knit T-shirt which I said I’d do in July.
Wearing: shorter hair after getting 6 inches chopped off; my Adidas sambas, boyfriend jeans, loving my Katie Kime monogrammed Oxford, and a new pink Teddie sweater from J. Crew.
It’s been awhile since we’ve had a proper catch-up, so on this early Saturday morning, in bed with a cat, coffee, and a head cold, I’ll do just that.
We flew to Raleigh last weekend for a several-days-long birthday bash for Brandon’s dad. Relatives flew or drove in from all over the country. We had a splurgy dinner at the Angus Barn, a Raleigh steakhouse staple. Brandon and I split the tomahawk and a bottle of Shiraz and we ended up taking more than half the steak back to our hotel. (Brandon ate it over the next 2 mornings with eggs from the breakfast buffet! Until I finally told him that I thought our refrigerator was not keeping it cold enough to try for a third day and he reminisced about the Simpsons episode where Homer is determined to eat the entire sub sandwich despite it going slowly bad.) We enjoyed a rooftop evening at the ZincHouse Winery eating appetizers courtesy of his sister (this winery lets you bring in your own food! brilliant) and pizza from their food trucks and watching the ‘speed weddings’ in their gazebo. We walked in the historic Oakwood Cemetery and of course that brought to mind the song that inspired the title of this post (see end) which is still stuck in my head. We cautiously crept into the office to use the restroom, and the bespectacled young woman sitting in the sifting light from high many-paned windows with plants and stacks of headstone samples was delighted that we were Michiganders. She whipped out a map and with a green felt-tip pen, showed us where we could find a bit of home; at her advice, we found the grave of Ouida Estelle Emery Hood, who detested Raleigh so much that her husband buried her there in 50 barrels of Michigan soil.
My socializing is a little hit or miss, and I don’t usually look forward to traveling, but I know for many years when I look back on this spring, I won’t remember the little details. I won’t remember the commutes, the office days, what I ate for lunch or what outfits I wore, but I will remember ambling through the cemetery among the quiet Confederate dead, bright planes of southern sunshine, hearing the mockingbirds and smelling the lush honeysuckle tumbling over the iron fences.
Back home in Michigan, the spring is still launching. We bounce between cold snaps and hot days and the pollen has fallen like a smothering yellow veil (no doubt contributing to my sinus issues). The kiddo and I went to the re-release of one of my favorite movies (which she now also loves) – the 2005 ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and it was even more beautiful on the big screen. Otherwise, she is busy this spring of her junior year with soccer (I wish I could share her varsity soccer picture – she looks like a gorgeous young Valkyrie) and the SATs and starting up her summer plant nursery job and did anyone else know that Detroit has a women’s professional football team? I didn’t. But tonight she and her EMT cadet class are serving as medical support there, so I’ll be driving her and (I suppose) watching my first game.
I hope you are all well. I need to go eat something and take some sinus meds and if I feel better before the football game, I would like to check out opening day of our Farmer’s Market – I’m looking for some local honey, which I’ve heard can help with seasonal allergies. Take good care of yourselves and each other. xo
It’s been a bit quiet around the blog lately, but not in our lives.
The election was of course a dark time for us, as for many others. I am bitter and I cannot understand my fellow Americans. My heart is broken for all of the people who will suffer under this regime of unbridled ignorance, hate, greed and stupidity – gay and lesbian couples, bi, trans and all others who fear for their safety and their rights to live openly and love freely. The migrants who live in fear for themselves and their family members being harassed, hurt, put into camps and deported. Women and girls who will go without vital health care, contraception, and the right to safe abortions. And who have to know that a man found guilty of rape is considered by a majority of the country to be worthy of the presidency. The kids and families who have survived and those yet to be victimized by school shootings and then see the MAGA deplorables wear their NRA pins and show their AR-15’s in Christmas pictures. I’m disappointed and angry. And more than anything I just hope we have the right to vote again in 4 years.
However, after the election, Brandon and I got on an airplane in rainy Detroit and after a day of travel, were disgorged, disheveled, in hot and humid St. Croix. We spent the next week there, living in a remote seaside villa with 15 other people that I’ve never met before (childhood friends of Brandon’s). I can guarantee you that we did not see eye to eye on politics with at least half of our fellow houseguests but do you know how many times politics came up? Zero times. For that week we lived quite comfortably and happily in that small community where we were mutually respectful, shared food and time and space and resources, and enjoyed each other’s company. I wanted to love them for the people they are and not even know how they voted and for that brief moment I was able to do that. It was healing to my soul.
I don’t know how to reconcile this with my feeling of deep disappointment in and anger towards MAGA voters. I have wrestled for a long time with my feeling that this is more than a political disagreement, it’s a disagreement on fundamental values and human rights. I don’t have answers about how to reconcile and move forward, but I feel in equal measure that this knowledge and identification of community over and above rage baiting means that we are capable of doing better. I don’t have answers. But if anything, the election and the weeks following have made me think that the answer for me is grassroots. I am motivated to be more kind, to seek to understand and build in my community. I want to work less and volunteer more. I don’t want to argue about politics on the Internet or at all. I don’t want to cut people out of my life but I don’t want to suffer fools or villains. I want to defend and protect those among us who need it. I want to do better, be better and more compassionate while also demanding that same compassion and accountability from the people in my life. And to know how to move forward and beyond them if that isn’t given. I just don’t know the answers on how to seek common ground and live as humans and not parties, and truly if those are even the right questions when such fundamental issues are at stake.
That may be the work of years, not days or weeks.
Sigh.
Now we are getting ready for Thanksgiving next week – we are hosting my family so this weekend will be housecleaning, menu planning, and shopping, in between the kiddo’s indoor soccer games. We got our first mild snow on Thursday – nothing that really stuck, but after a very mild autumn, it was thrilling to see the weather finally catching up. I hope that you are all well and safe and that you have time to enjoy your people and your communities.
July has flown by and here we are with August ahead, which used to be a summer month (albeit an elderly one) but is now the back to school month. The kid has a driving test on Sunday, and then the hustle begins with pre-band camp, band camp, her sweet sixteen, picture day, and then the first day of school before Labor Day.
Brandon is still in Iowa but we managed to carve out a long weekend for a Chicago museum spree. (And gosh, I love Chicago. Maybe being a Midwesterner makes me biased, but that city has a vibe and an easygoing indifferent accessibility – a history and a style – like none other.) We stayed in a glass loft on the South Loop with a view of the rail and the river on one side and a glittering expanse of Lake Michigan on the other. It was blistering hot and stormed at night, lightning brighter than the city lights all around us.
“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
We saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘My New Yorks’ exhibit at the Chicago Institute of Art and although I’ve never been a huge fan of her flowers or Southwest motifs, seeing the city through her eyes and brush changed my opinion on her altogether.
“New York Night” by Georgia O’Keeffe
“The Shelton with Sunspots”
I’d vastly prefer my mister to be here, but with him gone, the structure of the summer has softened and turned uncertain. With more time to myself, I turn inward. There have been lots of summer evenings on the front porch with books, watching the sun wheel through the western sky and come down in sprays of green and gold through the leaves of our old tulip tree. I’ve read some really good things this summer – I loved a book of Kate Atkinson short stories ‘Normal Rules Don’t Apply’, and Lev Grossman’s ‘The Bright Sword’ was wonderful (and the last sentence flooded me with unexpected emotion and tears). I am reading a fantastic biography of Georgia O’Keeffe that reads almost like a novel and having these other little worlds to dive into after the workday is done (and sometimes before evening calls with my colleagues in Japan as we negotiate a thorny contract) has been like a swim in a very cool pool when you’re hot and sticky.
I head out on a business trip tomorrow which will likely be a short and uninspiring parade of a boxy interstate hotel and strip mall restaurants and then home for a weekend of hopefully not much by the pool with Georgia as she meets Alfred Steiglitz. There is a cardinal sitting in the pine tree outside of my open home office window singing for the feeders to be refilled. August ahead looks – busy? and short with all of the activity. It is a birthday month for a few very important women in my life – mother, grandmother, and the kid. Anyway, I hope to greet it on the porch with a book and possibly armed with a knitting needle. Be well and enjoy the last heavy breath of summertime.
We’ve just enjoyed a week in the Bahamas for the kid’s Spring Break. She was such a trooper about last year’s Colonial Williamsburg Spring Break that this year we promised and delivered a tropical trip.
Not knowing much about the traditional island vacation destinations we picked Atlantis in the Bahamas. We were fortunate to have very easy travel days and no flight issues on JetBlue. The resort itself is sprawling and has several gorgeous pools, a water park with an extensive lazy river, slides through aquarium tanks, open air habitats for turtles, mantas and sharks. There are different hotels in the resort complex and we stayed at the Royal, close to the park and pools. This was good for the kid but Brandon and I agreed that if we were ever to return, we’d stay at the Cove, which is quieter, more sedate, and private. However, the rooms were very quiet, the walls thick, and we heard nary a disturbing peep from our neighbors.
This year has already been pretty stressful for all of us for various reasons so we had no plans to do anything other than go somewhere warm and relax. We didn’t book any excursions or sightseeing, which is unusual for us. For most of the trip, we were parked poolside. The beaches were not busy – the waves were high during our stay and the resort staff kept people away from the water. Beach chairs went fast and the pools were less windy, closer to bathrooms and amenities. The weather was consistently excellent- warm and bright, high 70’s and perfect for poolside lounging. I donned my coastal grandmother bucket hat and white Oxford shirt and read several books. There were multiple bars and restaurants and a resort casino featuring a few spectacular Chihuly installations. And we walked through the marina, full of sleek long yachts against the almost surreal backdrop of the sun setting in the palm trees.
The downsides were standard. The resort is simply enormous and busy – Vegas on the beach. You have to plan meals and make reservations and be prepared to stand in line and pay top dollar for everything. (Luckily we eat early so we generally did not have a problem finding tables.) Pool and beach chairs go fast and people go down early to claim the best ones (again, not a problem for us, since eating early = going to bed early = getting up early. We were generally poolside by 8:30. However, we did see many late-risers wandering around sadly at about noon, looking for empty chairs and bemoaning the long lines for towels and water slide wristbands.) It is not all-inclusive so you simply bleed money. Everything is ridiculously upcharged. Case in point- although we packed sunscreen, we went through it faster than expected (hello pale Midwesterner skin) and were forced to pay TWENTY SEVEN DOLLARS for one bottle from the resort store.
stalking resort cats
There was great people-watching (Brandon: “I can’t remember a trip as rich in its interface with raw humanity!”) We saw an unfortunate amount of panic over lost items poolside including one woman in hysterics over a lost phone and another over a lost passport. We saw many dead-eyed parents dragging overtired, underfed, wailing kids through the corridors. We heard many rote intonations of “get off the floor”, “my God can’t we take you ANYWHERE WITHOUT HAVING A SCENE” and even an “I WILL LEAVE YOU HERE” as kids melted down. We saw a dad push a stroller into the bar looking for his wife who was there drinking champagne only to have the kid pluck her champagne flute out of her hand and send it sailing across the bar to crash into splinters as he looked on, expressionless. We heard rumors of one part of the hotel in which the elevator lines could be prohibitively long at the end of the day, stretching down the corridor, filled with screaming children and strollers.
I don’t know if we’d go back – next year we may do a cruise or go somewhere all-inclusive – but we were happy to get away and have a sunshine break and for what we were looking for, this fit the bill perfectly. I have stored up sunshine in my bones for the remainder of our sullen Michigan spring.
Happy July! The last few days have been rife with terrible air quality from the Canadian wildfires, rage and disappointment at our ‘pay for play’ SCOTUS, and long days thanks to the kid’s Drivers’ Ed. But we are now in July and I have goals.
Before I get into that, though, when we last spoke, I was getting ready to head to Cincinnati with my daughter, her friends, and our mom troop. Unfortunately, my emotional battery did not hold its charge very well and I spent the first ~24 hours with a nervous stomach. We AirBNB’d a massive Victorian in the historic Walnut Hills neighborhood, which promised two floors and sleeping space for 22. We gave the girls the top floor, with their own kitchenette, bathroom, and living room, and the moms bunked on the floor below them. The house may have slept 22 but only if you included couches and multiple folks per bed. This, my friends, is not something I’d be capable of, so I guiltily scoped out a terrible futon in the turret room where I could at least pull a curtain and be alone.
The girls had an absolute blast and between my sick stomach and the endless stairs to haul luggage, food, water, and cooking supplies up to our roost, I lost 4.2 pounds.
Despite the constant threat of storms, we managed to get the girls to Kings’ Island, which is a favorite for my little family since Brandon worked there as a teenager. It was a perfect day – the park was not crowded and the kids didn’t have to wait longer than 25 minutes for any ride. The kiddo has been there before so she played what she called ‘airport dad’ with her friends and gave them the deluxe tour. Even the girls who weren’t too hyped about roller coasters became converts and we closed the park down at 10 with fireworks and the light show. The moms were all impressed with KI – it’s clean and compact with a high concentration of fun coasters and a charming little ‘Main Street’ with fountains, cafe tables under umbrellas, and sweets and souvenir shops under the shade of the ‘Eiffel Tower’. And something about an amusement park in summertime – even the moms got into a lighthearted, almost childlike state – dancing with Snoopy, buying fudge and candy apples, and one of the moms even buying a stuffed Bob Ross doll.
Also among the girl goals was ‘ shopping in cute outfits’ (hahaha – I love teenagers) so the next day, after one of the girls made waffles, we took them to the mall and they spent major bank at Starbucks, Sephora and Ulta. By all measures, a successful trip.
The Canadian wildfires created major air quality issues for us last week, which seem to be diminishing now. The kiddo finished up Drivers’ Ed and hopefully, we can pick up her permit before she heads off for 12 days at Blue Lake Fine Arts camp.
Altogether, June was a bit of a bust in terms of my goals – I didn’t get as many running miles in, or stay in my healthy eating zone for as much as I’d have liked. July will hopefully be better, less busy with the kid at camp, so my goals are:
50 running miles;
Healthy eating zone 15 days;
10-minute daily yoga sessions at least 4x / week;
10-minute daily knitting at least 4x / week.
I decided to pick up yoga again a couple of months ago when I temporarily lost my running mojo. I made it to several classes at my local studio. And I was inspired by one of my fellow mom tribe in Cinci, who brought her travel mat and did quick morning yoga videos every day we were there. Even if I can’t get to the studio for a full class, I can certainly fit in a 10-minute daily session several times a week. And since July is Tour de France month, wherein Brandon and I are absorbed in several hours of tour coverage every day, I can easily hit those knitting goals.
I hope everyone is looking forward to a safe and healthy 4th. I am working today, but will be off tomorrow for the holiday and Wednesday for kiddo camp dropoff, which is a 6-hour round trip. Be well and talk soon.
Summer 2022 – gradually coming out of a pandemic mindset, feeling more normal (although it’s a new normal).
We didn’t take a long vacation this year. The kiddo’s schedule was not the ‘mellow sleeping in until noon’ that we had expected – she starts high school in the fall, and had a long musical arts camp at Blue Lake, she took a high school credit course online, and her high school marching band had 2-3x weekly rehearsals and sectionals. So while it wasn’t the full onslaught of the spring track & field plus theater, it was still a lot of chauffeuring and sitting-in-the-car-knitting while I waited for her. Oddly, these are some of my favorite times and memories from this summer…I am valuing them because it’s not long now until she starts to drive, and will be more independent with her activities. (*sniff*)
Brandon’s sister came to visit for a weekend in July, and we enjoyed our downtown Founders’ Festival and the local 5k color run. Brandon has been at the skateboard park with the Old Bros club every weekend, and he & I went back to our fave restaurant Lucy & the Wolf in Northville for a date for the first time since the pandemic. I’ve been splitting my days between working from home, and going into the office 1-2x a week. I’ve read lots of books, listened to some great podcasts, run not as many miles as I’d like, finished a Night Owl cross-stitch, watched some great documentaries and Stranger Things 4 and spent an inordinate amount of time with the Tour de France (JONAS VINGEGAARD!!!!).
We did take a long weekend in New Orleans in June to celebrate school being out. It was ridiculously hot and in retrospect, a somewhat odd place to take a thirteen-year old. (Her first assessment is that it was dirty. LOL) But I love NOLA, the architecture and the history, and we tried to soak that in despite the 100+ degree swamp temps. We lounged in Jackson Square, went to the aquarium, went to Marie Laveau’s voodoo shop, had the kid’s fortune read, took an open top bus tour of the city (and got rained on), we ate tons of amazing food, and we ventured outside the city for a swamp tour and met Elvis Jr, an enormous alligator. We took a Dark History walking tour and learned all sorts of macabre tidbits, I found a knitting shop in the French Quarter (Quarter Stitch), and we visited a vintage book store (Crescent City Books). We fit a lot in during our time there.
Summer isn’t over yet but the kid has a week of band camp and then school starts before Labor Day on the 29th. It’s not long now. The only thing to do is enjoy it! We have a pool pass for the month of August, I’m looking forward to back to school shopping and the first home football game & band halftime show (which happens even before school starts), and lots of front porch knitting & reading with a glass of wine.
I hope everyone is enjoying their season. All the best from our house to yours. xo
It’s taken me a bit longer than I anticipated to get this post pulled together so thanks for your patience! It just means we were having a really awesome time on our trip and then had to quickly throw ourselves back into real life to finish out this week strong.
We front-loaded the weekend with the half marathon, so as soon as we were off the plane, Brandon’s sister picked us up and we were off to the expo (I was thrilled to note when I got my bib that Brandon had personalized it!) Brandon’s sis is one of the good ones, for sure. She’s an Ali McGraw, willowy, athletic Vineyard Vines / Northern by birth but Southern by choice who puts in minimum sixty hour work weeks and yet still finds the time to play competitive tennis, do Pilates, be the integral glue for a big Southern family and train for her first half. AND plan a perfect weekend trip for us.
She found us a beautiful flat almost right on Lafayette Square, just behind Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, and everything, including race start and end, were within walking distance. The race route went right past our corner and we could have stood in the bay window to watch it. The morning started out cold, at least for Savannah – in the 50’s – and we bundled up in throwaway fleeces & sweatshirts after eating our toast & getting hydrated.
The route was flat and lovely – taking us through a lot of the city that we wouldn’t see as tourists as well as through the historic areas. And of course, there were runners in costume – several Elvises and a Tommy Lee, running shirtless in black jeans and a flowing black wig, twirling drumsticks. I ran the first 5 or 6 miles with Brandon and his sister, keeping a slow, steady pace (12’s) and walking through aid stations. I never would have known it was her first half – she was a champ! Then when we ran past our flat, their parents came out to hug and cheer them on and I lost them in the scrum. I didn’t want to stop because I knew that if I did I would have a harder time getting started again, so I popped in my headphones and powered on. I felt strong and ran the next few miles between 11.15 and 10.42 (mile 10 was my quickest at 10.42) and then hit the wall at mile 11, gradually slowing down – 11.37, 11.40, 11.45.
Official Event Results: 2:32:52
Garmin time: 2:33 (11.37)
I felt great throughout, probably due to a very relaxed first six miles, and never had a moment during the race where I felt like I was suffering, even in the last 2 miles. I really enjoyed running with Brandon and his sister (who finished strong about ten minutes behind me, with Brandon running with her) but I think if I’d run my own race, I could have thrashed my A2 Half time (although it’s not a great comparison because the elevations are so different and there was nothing equivalent to the Arb Hill in Savannah).
The rest of our trip was spent sightseeing, napping, eating, and watching (and nastily critiquing) Hallmark Christmas movies on the only channel we reliably got other than sports networks. I found a local yarn shop and made some purchases; I highly recommend The Frayed Knot if you’re in Savannah and need yarn!
We took the riverboat tour on a bright, sunny afternoon, and shopped at Black Dog for souvenirs; we toured the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, which was excellent; and we celebrated Brandon’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary with dinner at Elizabeth on 37th. This is a fabulous restaurant in an old Thomas Square mansion, and we found out halfway through the meal that our server is actually the owner (and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee).
I fell in love with the lush green elegance and history of the city, the fountains and ghosts and Spanish moss, and cannot wait to go back.
pizza at pagliai’s; hamm’s beer and cheeseburgers at george’s; the haunted bookshop; and street art
B & I had a great visit in northside Iowa City. In my estimation, he picked the perfect neighborhood to live in, and we spent our two days together enjoying it. The sun was shining and the weather was milder than Michigan; we ran down around the University of Iowa campus, ate cheeseburgers at George’s (dive bar extraordinaire) and browsed at the Haunted Bookshop where I finally spotted the other resident cat (I had to go both days).
We finally watched one of the Oscar-nominated films (I don’t think either of us had seen any of them yet) – Three Billboards. Although the casting was wonderful, the movie itself perplexed and annoyed both of us. Spoiler Alert –> Couldn’t they have just focused on the ensemble cast and the themes of grief and vengeance and foregone the Molotov cocktails and the throwing of people out of windows?
It was a short visit (made shorter by Daylight Savings) and all too soon I was back in my car for the six hour journey home. I picked an Audible unabridged version of Ann Rule’s “The Stranger Beside Me” (about her relationship with notorious serial killer Ted Bundy). Unfortunately, this book is leaving me perplexed and annoyed as well, and not just because Ted Bundy was an evil maniac. It’s making me feel as though maybe I’m just an overly critical consumer of entertainment. I’m not quite done with it yet, so I will refrain from sharing my feelings about it until I am.
Back home; I am plunged into preparations for Book Fair and fighting a sore throat and rampant ennui. I feel woefully inadequate for the tasks ahead of me in the next week and a half and I am trying to focus on a passage I read in the Crosswick Journals by Madeline L’Engle (a battered three-volume set that I picked up for a song at the aforementioned Haunted Bookshop, and which is filled with more wonderful quotes and musings than I can possibly begin to digest – and while I’m at it allow me to confess one additional thing that may prove my point about being overly critical – I am deeply suspicious of the new movie version of “A Wrinkle In Time” – deeply – and not just because it is packed with Oprah and “big names” – although that might be part of it):
“A winter ago I was asked by the Children’s Book Council to write a story, and agreed to do so. I was telling Tallis about it, and said, “I’m really very nervous about this.” He looked at me contemptuously: “You don’t think you’re going to have anything to do with it, do you?” “No,” I retorted, “but I could get in the way.”
To my great surprise, I fell in love with Iowa City over Thanksgiving weekend. I’m sure a lot of it had to do with the great company I was keeping, but B’s neighborhood charmed me to the core. He lives in the bottom floor of an old university residence in a neighborhood full of sprawling historic homes – golden planked wood floors, cracked plaster and tortoiseshell doorknobs. He pointed out the old Civil War recruiting house and the stone step, worn away from boots. Similar to the town where I grew up, there were random stone steps for climbing into carriages on the curbs, and rambling Georgians and Victorians under old oak trees. He lives close to church spires and the sound of their bells, and he can hear the whistle at the old power plant that still sets out the framework of the workday.
We ran our own Turkey Trot around campus on Thanksgiving morning. It was crisp and cold and the river was like glass.
I’d expected that we would spend the day cooking and watching The Godfather marathon on AMC, but B had a surprise for me. One of the fellows he works with knew he was alone in the city, and invited him to his parent’s church for a Thanksgiving meal. The invitation was made so nicely that B didn’t want to refuse, and I was happy to go – who turns down two Thanksgiving meals? Not this girl.
We drove a few minutes to the nearby town and followed the directions. “There it is,” I said, and B turned quickly down a side street to park in a drift of fallen leaves. “I didn’t see it,” he said. “Well,” I said, “it doesn’t look like your typical church.”
In fact, the church is a converted pizza restaurant, and I had a bad moment of shyness when we walked into the big single room – lots of faces turned to us. However, very quickly we found two empty seats next to the pastor and his wife, and the fellow who had invited B came over. We spent a very pleasurable two hours eating a great buffet-style meal and chatting with our tablemates in an amazing show of hospitality and friendship. We went home to our own cooking and relaxation, and Godfather and Edward Gorey 1,000 piece puzzle feeling happy that we’d had an adventure in holiday spirit. And later that evening, we decorated the little tree that I’d brought from Michigan to help brighten his holiday season.
yes, that’s elvis in the tree.
On Black Friday it was almost 70 so we walked the prairie trail at the Herbert Hoover museum, had big turkey sandwiches for lunch, and spent hours browsing at the Haunted Bookshop, a labyrinthine used bookshop not far from B’s house.
50,000 books, two cats, and ghost is the haunted bookshop’s tagline – but we only saw the books and 1 cat.
On Saturday, we ran again, and I made a quick pilgrimage to a house I knew from the funny pages. My Michigan team fell to his Ohio State Buckeyes and he took me for beer and amazing cheeseburgers at an ancient dive bar to soothe my disappointment.
bloom county forever
All too soon, it was time to load up my car and drive home – listening to a really good Charlie Donlea audiobook mystery – and home to this face.
Miss L comes home today and I can’t wait to see her and hear about her adventures, and tell her mine. I hope you & yours had as lovely a weekend as I did. xoxo
Six Ten 