Home from Turkey

My bro and his wife have a beautiful house and great kids, but I may like the Airstream even more. I already showed you pictures of it in the daytime. Here it is at night.

Yesterday afternoon I went in there to take a nap, balling up under the comforter and falling asleep to the drumming of rain on tin.

Now that Mom has her own laptop, there was some serious parallel computing going on while Mylissa made dinner.

That cute thing at the left is Lillie who is very funny, and then there’s my very own green mother [speaking of green, you don’t want to see her mad; those green eyes spit flame], and me wee brother.

I hadn’t known my younger niece very well but we got to hang out and I decided she’s worth keeping. Be careful of challenging her to a jigsaw puzzle. You’ll get whalloped.

This is Walker and Mason. Walker is seventeen and into glass-blowing. He made the glasses we drank out of. The same is not true of Mason, but maybe someday.

I had to hold my breath to survive the horrible smell emanating from my brother. I did in the name of family unity, or umoja, as we say in Kiswahili.

And here is the beautiful My [her name is Melissa, and everyone calls her Mole except for me. I call her My because she’s mine], my sister in law who is an amazing cook and who produced the most cheerful baby I’ve ever met:

I think I was driving people crazy because every time someone said something (okay, not every time, but once or twice), I said something like, —”Well, isn’t that a fine example of pragmatics in action!” And whenever I played quietly with Mason I couldn’t stop analyzing his baby-babbling: —”Hmmm, I wonder if this is a culture-specific sound. I hope I’m modeling properly. Maybe I should introduce him to Spanish.” Being away from school for a few days makes me feel like I’ve escaped from a cult.

I left Wood’s Hole around 10:30 this morning, right after the others took Maw to the train station. Before heading inland I made a dash toward the shore to make sure I really had been in Cape Cod. I had.

It’s about a 3.5-hour drive home, but I didn’t get here till five. Upon my return I found a message on my cell phone from my worried mother: —”Where are you? You promised to call when you got back.” I don’t recall that vow, but I rang back and told her about my day. “I took a detour on the way home. I was on Highway 117 in Massachusetts when I saw a turnoff to Otter Creek so I followed that, because Katie likes otters. But a few miles away the road was closed so I went in a different direction and ended up in New Hampshire. There was a pretty mountain in the distance, so I tried to get there. I kept following smaller and smaller roads and I finally found the base and a trail. I parked the car and hiked up to the snow.”

—”You, child, are your father’s daughter,” she said.

Here’s the mountain that called me:

Before I reached the mountains I saw some boggy woods that I was curious about. I pulled over and crunched my way toward the marsh. Fifteen feet in among vines, I heard a loud crack and heard the sound of breaking dry wood. Bam: five feet in front of me landed a not-inconsequential, Schwarzenegger-arm-sized branch.

Once on the mountain trail I was glad I was alone.Were I with younger people, they would have left me behind. And people my own age would have had better sense then to clamber up the steep, slick rock. Here are some pictures of the walk:

I wanted to keep climbing to the summit — I was climbing pretty fast and probably got about 2 miles up the trail — but the ranger had told me to turn back at three so I could get down before dark, so I forlornly obeyed. Oh, by the way: It was Mount Monadnock, near Jaffrey and Dublin, NH.

Once back in the car, I stopped for a few pretty sights on the way home, too.