Catching up

Even though I am now back in Spain when I post this, I had to finish my trip around the world…

Most of my time in St. Louis was spent between meeting people at the SLU St. Louis campus and doing more research. It was so gratifying to catch up with people I hadn't seen in a while and to meet people I had corresponded with and never had a chance to meet in person. Conversations spent with my PhD advisee were also heady and fruitful. It was also edifying to have the chance to spend time browsing in two big university libraries, SLU and Washington University.

Then, Luis arrived in St. Louis on Thursday, April 15, and we had a few days there with Diana. We spent the time running/walking in Tower Grove Park, hanging out with Diana at SLU and out for meals, including a delightful balmy Sunday afternoon spent walking around St. Louis’s Central West End, an area with lots of small shops and cafes. We bought Diana (at her request) a Spanish cookbook in one of the bookshops (hmmmm…maybe next time we go, she’ll surprise us with a culinary delight!) and then spent a good hour sipping tea at an outdoor café, watching the world go by.

On Monday, Luis and I said goodbye to Diana (always so hard!) and flew off to Norfolk, Virginia, to spend a couple of nights staying with mom Shirley and visiting with my brother Ned. We really only had one full day there which was spent in anticipation of our coming trip, as we needed to shop for a pair of trousers for Luis (so he’d be able to have dinner at the country club a few days later) and me interviewing Ned about his work with the literacy program he created, Portsmouth Reads, so I would be able to present that work the following week at UMASS Boston. We also enjoyed dinner (steaks cooked on the grill, one of our favorite US treats!) with my Uncle Vincent (mom’s brother) and Aunt Antoinette. Then on Wednesday morning (April 21) we loaded up mom’s car, and Shirley, Ned, Luis and I headed off for Washington D.C. We had quite a rainy drive…just 3½ hours, so not so bad. We first stopped in Alexandria, just outside Washington D.C. on the Virginia side, to visit with our goddaughter Anne Marie Charboneau, and her little son Cole. We hadn’t seen Anne in years, not since Rockford days, so it was great catching up and seeing her little one-year old, a little blond cherub of a cutie, reeling around in his early days of walking.

Then we drove off to Potomac, also outside Washington, but on the Maryland side, where we met up with my sister Mary Ellen and her husband, Jack, just outside the door of my cousin Patty’s house. That started a wild evening of reconnecting with cousins from my dad’s side of the family. These are the cousins that I grew up with in Rockford, Illinois, with whom many hours were spent at family gatherings, especially at our grandparents house, where we would jump on beds (until someone came up to chastise us), put on plays, check out the attic (which we were convinced must have a secret door to another world somewhere), and generally revel in the delight that cousins offer – almost like brothers and sisters, but without the rivalries! We enjoyed one another’s company as much now as then, and the most frequent sound was laughter. We had the added pleasure of getting to know my cousin’s kids more, including Patty and Jerry’s son Christopher (many fond memories of them with their daughter Claire in both London and Madrid over the years…including a story Jerry would rather forget about spilled gazpacho and the rags used to clean it up just last summer) and Christopher’s soon bride-to-be Alexis.

Patty, Sue and Mary Ellen.

Luis giving advice to Christopher and Alexis

 Luis and Jerry (uh oh…)

 (from left to right: Patty, Sue, Sarah (birthday girl!), Joseph and Liz

 Luis and Jack enjoying Patty and Jerry’s backyard…)

The next morning we got up and went for a walk/run (really the springtime in the US is glorious), and the piled in the car to drive up to my Aunt JoAnne (dad’s sister) and Uncle Dale’s house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Now you can see Luismi’s nice trousers…needed for the delicious dinner we had at the Lancaster Country Club. Uncle Dale was right about the crabcakes, and I’m glad I ordered them!

The next morning (let’s see…this was now Friday, April 23), Jack and Mary Ellen dropped us off at the Lancaster train station, and off we chugged to Philadelphia. The scenery outside the train window was bucolic…we could see the Amish farmers with teams of horses pulling their plows, as they went about their work on the farm, with clotheslines stretched from tree to tree behind the farmhouses, full of long garments and aprons, flapping in the wind. When we got to the Philadelphia train station, we realized that we were in the opening scenes of Witness, the Harrison Ford film about a young boy who witnesses a murder in that very same train station. As we waited for the train that would take us up to Boston, we saw an elderly Amish couple emerge from one of the stairways, and we really felt like we were in the film.