Home from home

So Helen are back from our awesome adventurr!!!1! and after a few days of shock & outrage that we are actually expected to get up before 9, we seem to be back on track.

It's been 19 years since I claimed Ohio as my permanent address, which means that Colorado has been my home state for longer than the Buckeye state, but part of me is still based on the equation that Ohio = home. This despite the fact that I am surprised when the radio there plays non-80s music (you mean they've heard of Lady Gaga here, too?)

Obviously, my homing instinct is based largely on the presence of these good folks:

Helen, grandparents & her new monkey. Not pictured: the inaugural photo series featuring monkey.

It also has something to do with leafy deciduous forests and briars and poison ivy and cardinals and old cornfields grown up with cedar trees. I'm never adverse to visiting the Big City, of course, and it has its delights. We visited the art museum, ran boisterously along the splendidly redone waterfront and wandered the cute and quaint Mt Adams neighborhood. We ate dinner in a kiln at the Rookwood Pottery. It was fun, but then we drove home, and that was still the best part.

This is the kind of neighborhood that makes me forget I don't like living in cities.

I'm always comforted to get back to my parents' house and the woods around it. I like to think that my kids will always have this little piece of outdoors that feels like theirs, that they've known and roamed around on since they were small. At one point I kind of hoped to give them that in Colorado, except that a) not the right tax bracket and b) just the thought of a second home and all the extra painting, scraping, winterizing, vacuuming, etc, that would entail makes me want to lie down and cry.

Two hours after an all nighter on the plane, Helen grabbed an umbrella and dragged my Dad out into the Woods. That's my kind of child.

Sometimes I think about how, someday, I won't actually have a home base in Ohio anymore. The thought panics me a little, and not just for the obvious reasons (although those are there, too). It makes me want to rush out and buy up old farming properties. Which, hahaha, no. Not the kind of second home I was thinking, thanks. 

It's also a trip to take my offspring to things like the Maple Sugar Festival at Hueston Woods, which has not changed one iota since 1978. I even bought the same soft crumbly maple sugar candy at the end. (And I'm not alone; other grownups on the tour, including a woman my age with a son well into his twenties AND a two-year-old daughter and quite a few in between--I am strenuously resisting the urge to tut, And THAT'S why left this town, folks--was reminiscing about the maple sugar candy from when she used to go as a child.)

Tastes like water.

Same trees, same buckets, same sugaring off house.

Meanwhile, on the home front, this:

M. took five different photos of Si in the pitcher's wind-up, and in every one he has the same expression. It's uncanny.

One of many. Baseball season has officially begun: four practices a week and up to six games. I start to feel sorry for myself and then I remember poor Silas is required to attend it all.