Boston Strong

My stop in Boston was the longest I've had since I hit the road a month ago, so even though there was a lot else going on, I got to spend a good amount of time exploring one of my favorite cities. My friend M introduced me to the Brookline Booksmith and the great Coolidge Corner area, which somehow I don't think I ever went to during my college years. We were lusting after the decorative paper products.

Then I met my friend D at City Feed in Jamaica Plain and got a tour from her of that neighborhood, which I'd also not been at all familiar with in college.

One night with my family, we battled in the insane traffic on Atlantic Ave to go to dinner in the North End, which is one of my absolute favorite spots in Boston. Not only is it the Italian part of town, but it is a key part of the Freedom Trail, including Paul Revere's unassuming house and Paul Revere Square. (That's the Old North Church silhouetted against the night sky in the second pic down, and a mini memorial for the marathon bombing victims beneath the statue.)

The full-fledged marathon bombing memorial that has developed in Copley Square is a sombre but powerful scene, with throngs of people paying their respects and news vans perpetually parked on the sidelines.

But no doubt such an amazing city will rebound, better than ever. The beauty of springtime definitely looked good on Boston this visit....

Uncle G

Though this visit to Boston was long-overdue in terms of visiting friends here, it was also in part so that I could be at a memorial service for my uncle G. He, along with my aunt J (who sadly passed away when I was in Madagascar), were my surrogate parents when I went to college in the area, and I spent much time at their house in Hingham or meeting them in the city for meals or museums. It's so disorienting that they're both now gone. The end of an era, and too strange to process that I'll never again make the drive down the south shore to their house.

Still, it was three months ago that G passed away after a long illness, and the time intervening seemed to give everyone leeway to process much of their grief and make the memorial a really raucous, joyous occasion--which would have suited G perfectly. My aunt P and mother spent multiple evenings doing nothing but sifting through box after box after box of old family photos stashed in G's basement, marveling at how young they once were.

And on a brilliant spring morning, we scattered G's ashes (illegally, no doubt) in the local park where J's ashes were scattered almost exactly seven years ago.

In and among all the tasks and festivities and remembrances, there was a lot of good quality time with the surviving three siblings.

R.I.P., Uncle G.

Formative years

Yet another revisiting of a place I once lived, with all of the strong associations and memories that brings up as I drive roads I used to know. I was lucky enough to go to college near Boston, and on the way into town, I stopped to see a friend who still lives in the area, along with her daughter. Half a decade has passed since our last meeting, but strange how you can pick up right where you left off with people you are really connected to.

Ditto for the incredibly sweet mother of a girl I used to babysit in the town where my college is...

...the college itself, more beautiful than ever in the full glory of springtime....

...and a professor I've kept in touch with over the years. Next to her sits her son, who was born my last semester in school. I was his first babysitter, when he was about three days old. As we now watched him run a track meet at a neighboring high school, zooming past the other competitors at amazing speeds, she reminded me how nervous she'd been with him as a newborn. "Is he breathing? Does that sound like normal breathing?" she asked the 22 year-old version of me several times as I sat holding his tiny, 6-lb body in the crook of my arm. "He's perfect," I told her.

Ithaca is Gorges

Thanks to a wonderful aunt and uncle who have lived there for many years, I got to spend a few days in Ithaca, having lunch at the edge of Beebe Lake on the Cornell campus (where my uncle is a professor)...

...visiting the house they are nearly finished building on the shore of Cayuga Lake...

...having dinner at the famous (thanks to it's popular line of cookbooks) Moosewood Café...

...and attending a dinner at the beautiful Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Ever since I got back from Africa, my uncle has been keeping a bug in my ear about getting a PhD in Development Sociology at Cornell, and that bug is now making some serious noise; 14 years after graduating from undergrad, I might finally be ready to think seriously about going back to school in some way shape or form at the end of my current "temporary retirement." The problem is having to choose just one direction. Teaching English as a second language? Creative writing? International Development? Will there be many future blog posts with an Ithaca location? Only time will tell....

To D.C....and beyond!

The day I drove into D.C. was an eventful one. In Alexandria, I visited one of my oldest childhood friends, her own kids (whom I'd not yet met) now about the age we were when we first started playing together.

Then I crossed into Arlington and got to have dinner with one of my good friends from Peace Corps Morocco and his wife, whom I'd also never met before. (They answered the door draped in the quilt I made them as a wedding present.)

From there, it was on to the Silver Spring home of my fabulous friend of 15 years (from back in the days of study abroad in Padova), L. In between making a visit to her daughter's preschool classroom to help out with the school's international day and L's working from home schedule, I helped out with her making two skirts, two cloth napkins, and a shoulder bag. Not a bad sewing haul in less than 24 hours! (This is L. working hard to sew a straight line. Didn't want anyone who doesn't know her to think her face always looks like that.)

I've never really considered D.C. before. I mean, I think I visited once as a child, and then spent a long weekend there in high school seeing the sights when my choir was selected to represent Wisconsin for festivities around the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII. When our Morocco program got evacuated, they flew us straight to D.C., with plenty of time to explore the city then, too...but because I'm not a very politically inclined person, it never really occurred to me to take serious interest in it as a potential place to live. But in addition to seeing some of the iconic sights on this trip....

...I was reminded that along with its heavy political emphasis, D.C. is the place to be for people who work (or want to work) internationally. The place is dripping with Peace Corps connections, among a gazillion other international organizations. It was so fun and exhilarating to hear that one person I asked after had moved to India, another was working in Afghanistan, and a third was on a work trip to the Philippines. You'd think there would be no one left in the city, but still it was the opposite. I've barely made it out to the East Coast at all during my time in Denver, so it had been 7-9 years since I'd seen the half-dozen Peace Corps Madagascar friends I got to catch up with while in town.

Heading out of the city, it was more Mada fun. First I stopped in Baltimore to see K, who I'd not connected with since she left Madagascar in 2004. She took me on a fabulous walk around the city, and there happened to be some sort of pirate festival going on, which created exactly the kind of atmosphere of absurdity that we so often found ourselves in in Madagascar. (This is K standing in line for coffee behind a pirate. Didn't want anyone who doesn't know her to think her face always looks like that. I'm just now realizing that it can be really hard to tell when someone is making a silly face if you aren't familiar with her visage at rest.)

From Baltimore, it was on to the central Pennsylvanian town of Berwick, to see yet another Peace Corps Mada friend and her husband, who are posing here outside the church where they got married.

And from here, I'm still northbound....

Now and then

It was a month after I graduated from college that I packed up my life and first drove to Warren County, North Carolina. Though it was my home for only two years, more than a decade ago, it is still overwhelming for me on every level whenever I head northeast from Raleigh-Durham, cruising into increasingly rural territory, cotton and tobacco fields lining the roads, the air thick with humidity (or "close," as I learned from my students to call it), the names of towns and roads eerily familiar, though they've long passed out of the active part of my memory. This visit was no different. When I was on the roads, everything felt familiar, though I didn't trust myself to totally remember where I was going, especially since the directions I gave to visiting friends at that time tended to be along the lines of: "Go about a quarter of a mile and then turn left at a brown fence next to a field that usually has three black and white cows standing around a small pond..." So now I have to check the map.

But the cows are still around, and the air still close and peaceful, and the colors still so vivid.

I visited the house, not too far from the school where we taught, that my friend E. rented for those two years. It is still standing and doesn't look too worse for the wear 12 years later, though unoccupied. I have strong memories of standing on this porch watching lightening storms roll in.

There's the intersection that I drove past every day that I came over from where I was living, at the point where I had to turn into the town center or continue on to the middle school, as beautiful now as it was then...

...and the little cottage on Lake Gaston that I lived in with two other teachers, nestled into the woods just like I remember, though GPS tried to lead me wrong and I drove right past it, unrecognizing, on my first pass. It's so much smaller than I remember...though I didn't forget how I was always scared of and watchful of snakes while walking through the un-mown grass around the house and down toward the lake's edge (where a new dock now stands to match the new, expanded porch at the back of the house).

The center of the county seat is more adorable than ever, with efforts to revitalize the area as an antiques and countryside get-away continuing--though both cafés in town were closed when I tried to go to them, and I ended up at the trusty pizza place where I had dinner at least once per week when I lived there.

I stayed at the guesthouse built on property owned by my friend J, whose mentorship as a fellow teacher at the middle school is no doubt the reason why I survived my two years there at all, terrible disciplinarian and 22-year-old baby that I was. On this visit, J took me to a local barbecue joint for my favorite southern eats: hush puppies!

We also met up with one of my favorite former students, who now has a baby of her own...

...and went 'coon huntin' with J's husband, K, and their dogs, who get practice "tree-ing" raccoons pretty much every night.

The whole visit was a disorienting blend of new memories layered over old. 'Coon hunting with J and K, I remembered doing the same 13 years ago with E. Looking at our house on Oak Drive now, I also saw it as it looked during my first winter in N.C., when a freak snowstorm dumped two feet of powder across the county, and the temps stayed so low for so long that the ice on the rural roads didn't melt, school buses couldn't get through, and the district closed down for two weeks, forcing us to then have school every Saturday for pretty much the rest of the year--and forcing my housemates and I to bundle up and hike more than a mile through the snow to the closest convenience store to restock on food and TP (after I drove my car into the ditch trying to leave the driveway for the same mission).

Or the time that J and K were going out of town for a 'coon huntin' competition and so left their two baby, orphaned goats with me for regular feedings and care, and I spoiled them so rotten they wouldn't stop whining for attention when J got home and she had to give them away so as not to be driven insane.

And, of course, the kids, always the kids. I spent two days in J's classroom during this visit, talking to her 8th graders about Africa. In between classes, watching the students mill through the hallways, I kept getting false glimpses of my own, 6th grade students' faces, as they looked 13 years ago.

A formative life experience for me, to say the least. And such an overwhelming and thought-provoking--in the best possible way--experience to return for a visit.

Driving into Spring

From Chicago, made some serious tracks in just a couple of days.

Cruised through/out of the great city of Chicago...

...and down into Indiana. When did all of these windmills get constructed? I find them so beautiful.

Pushed on into Ohio...

...before finally stopping to rest for the night in the town of Athens, where a couple of my Peace Corps friends live. I'm not even going to tell you how great Athens is, as it must be one of the best-kept secrets in the country, and I think the residents would like to keep it that way. The Saturday morning farmer's market was announcing the arrival of spring, which I really appreciated.

If you haven't noticed from the pictures, it was cold and rainy for much of my time in the Midwest, so it felt brilliant to start driving into sunnier (in Athens) and then, slowly but surely, warmer (as I cruised through West Virginia and Virginia)...

...until I returned, finally, to my once-upon-a-time home of North Carolina.

More on that later. First I met up with a couple of friends in the Raleigh-Durham area and soaked up some warmth and sunshine, complete with a lazy Sunday morning by the pool of my friend G's apartment complex.

Enjoy the big city, as we're about to head into the best kind of boonies....