I do not want to jinx it, but the trend lines are good.
After more than two weeks of hardcore, no holds barred vacationing, I'm back home and doing pretty well. I went to vestibular therapy this morning after nearly three weeks away and the verdict is, "hey! I'm not half bad!"
What we did included enough driving cross country with small children to make a grown man cower. It included heat, beating sun, humidity, various flying insects, rustic outdoor plumbing, grazing animals, Star Trek enthusiasts in full regalia, and many species of black and white spotted animals.
This is to say that a so-called "normal" person would probably have come home a bit bedraggled, and I too, NORMAL as I am, did indeed come home a bit bedraggled. But I'll take this is as a win. I'm hanging in there.
My photos are temporarily lost, but will be retrieved soon and then I will post some of the highlights.
The itinerary was aggressive. Day 1, The boys and I set out June 24th on our own, feeling quite smug at the lack of men-folk to escort us. We drove from our house in Bath, Ohio, to the lovely mall-rich hamlet of Chesterton, Indiana. That was about six hours on the road and all went fairly well. We stayed at a place that had a lot of waterfowl outside on the patio, including a pair of mom and pop swans and their ugly duckling baby swan.
Day 2, we picked up my long-lost Aunt Marilyn ( see this link for photos of her double wedding with my mom on 9/11/99) and her adorable little doggy Ping. Ping is a schipperke and really about the ideal dog. From his delicate little feet to his perky little ears, I loved this dog. He could dance! He could walk on his hind legs! He rode on a little silk carpet on Marilyn's lap from Chicago to my mom's farm near Wellman, Iowa.
Day 3: Sweltering. It was the day of the great parade in Riverside, Iowa, Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk. The kids were geared up for the parade, and Isaac kept referring back to an off-handed comment as to just exactly how big would a "bushel basket full of candy" be? For he was told that there would be candy galore. And indeed there was– for the kids lining the roadside. All the people threw candy from the floats, and the spectators just simply had to pick it up in great Halloween-esque sacks. But, even though he was cautioned that he would get a lot less candy if he was actually IN the parade, this was an opportunity too great to pass up. We rode on a big flat bed truck, adorned with a life-sized red-white-blue patriotic donkey sculpture, a live Great Dane with black and white spots, several other people, dogs, kids with bugles and bowls of candy and dog biscuits to toss to the masses. It was small town Americana at its best, only better because many people were dressed in their Star Trek uniforms, and one float (apparently missed the memo on the theme of the parade) featured Darth Vader and a team of stormtroopers wearing kilts on their lower halves. I nearly died of heat exhaustion, but otherwise it was great– and as a crowning glory our float won first place!
Days 4, 5, 6: Hanging around mom and Max's lovely farm. The weather cooled off a bit and we attempted to make felt dog beds out of the mounds of sheep wool on hand. A relative failure. I had been warned that Jacob's Fleece would not felt, and this proved to be all too true. Also, they had a bronze pour at their foundry (max-cast.com), which the kids got to watch. It was very hot, loud, but exciting! And Isaac managed to make name plates for both boys in bronze. Other highlights included Grandpa Max's television debut as a bronze expert on the PBS show "The History Detectives." (The copperhead cane segment, Max is called Steve as that's his real name.) Isaac was very excited to get to watch the show with the star himself!! Also, Grandma Doris had a baby blue jay to feed, as well as her talking crow Boris. We caught a great bull frog in the pond. The boys got snuffled by curious horses and got to chase around a flock of about a hundred jacob's sheep. A word about sheep: they would swarm around our guest cottage at times, like the crack of dawn especially, and what struck me was that they didn't actually sound like real sheep. They sounded more like a group of people, large burly men and tiny children, all crawling around on their hands and knees and doing a loud fake sheep impression.
Days 7-12: Minneapolis. We drove up there, the boys, Marilyn, Ping and I. Marilyn and Ping stayed with my aunt Judy O, and we went to stay with my Dad and Patty. There was had a nice, relaxing sort of summertime visit. The kids played in the wading pool across the street. We saw Toy Story 3 (good!). We went over to Nicollet Island, my native soil, and played in the Mississippi river. I had fun down at the old beach where everyone used to skinny dip. Elias soon got sopping wet and then stripped naked, so it was the next generation of nakedness taking over I guess. It was lovely to see that the old back water and current patterns haven't changed, that the railroad trestle people used to jump off is still there, although the log we always used to swim to seems to have finally gone south. I forgot how long it's been since I've been to Minneapolis in the summer– we've been focussed on the winter holidays for the last several years I guess– and it was great to be there when everything was green and lush, rather than frozen and white.
On July 3 Ben flew out. The timing was sort of weird, because we had the great fortune to get tickets to a suite at the new Target Field– new downtown baseball field that is pretty awesome. Ben's flight landed in the middle of the game, and he came over on the light rail. His pending arrival caused some angst– would he make it?? What inning would he catch? But it worked out fine, he arrived in the 8th I think. The extended family was together there and my brother made a joyous announcement that I won't share here in case it's not totally public. Also for some reason the Navy SEALS dropped on to the field by parachute from a very high plane overhead. The boys loved that part. However there was a great deal of crying and sobbing also, involving an altercation over cotton candy. Isaac actually was sitting under a desk and crying, while Elias, less shy about it, was actually screaming and kicking in the middle of the floor.
We had a good 4th with the perfect fireworks display in the park across from my dad and Patty's house. For me it was a migrainous challenge to some degree, what with all the explosions and bright flashing lights, but I also really enjoyed lying on my back in the grass, eating cherries, and watching the full scale peony pyrotechnics bursting right above me.
Ben had swooped in to help with the drive home. On July 5 we set out into the corn fields and dairyland. We stayed in Chicago at the de luxe hotel 71, right on the river, pretty sweet view. Also in Chicago, they had the organic restaurants I need to sustain life away from a kitchen where I can cook migraine-friendly food myself. The boys took this all in stride. All things considered they are really good travelers.
And so… home. En route we got the call that Ben's grandmother, our dear Nana Joe, died. She was three weeks shy of her 99th birthday, and very ready to be done with life. We all knew this would happen sometime, but still it's always a surprise when it really does. In her case we had a lot of false alarms over the years, and in some ways her incredible durability started to create the impression that she was in fact immortal. She wasn't. She was a great friend to me over the last 15 years and I miss her already. Our casa blanca lilies– which she loved– are in bud and about to burst into full, white, fragrant, velvety flowers. They usually come just in time for her birthday, August 1st, and this time it makes both Ben and me melancholy to wish she had been here to see them just one more time. Isn't it always like, though? Life goes on for everyone else, and those no longer with us are bound to miss lots of great things we want them to see, things we want to tell them, or questions we wish we'd asked.
I wish she was here to see the incredible fence, which Ben and his dad finished while I was gone. It's like an addition to the house, I feel. I'm planning the layout in my mind and can't wait to begin to move in. The Ruth Stout No-work Gardening Method ("for the busy, the aging, and the indolent") is said to take three years to settle in. I think that's about right. Three years from now we'll have an incredible garden there, full of raspberries and shallots and asparagus and basil, sunflowers and yellow pear tomatoes and shelling peas.
Even without all that, it's summertime and the livin is easy.