THE WEEKENDER

I met Amy and Deborah in a town that I have visited a thousand times. Honestly, it was not far from where I grew up, but we managed to see things and explore areas that I had never seen before. I actually went inside the Price Tower instead of just seeing it from the road and then we discovered another tower in a park that I had no idea existed. That was called the Play-Tower and it was built in 1963 by Bruce Goff, commissioned by Mrs. Harold C. Price. The spiral staircase takes you up six feet to a steel ball and is rather terrifying, because once at the top, you can feel the tower swaying back and forth. When we made it back down, the three of spent the rest of trip complaining about our old lady knees. As per usual, there was lots and lots talking and lots and lots of laughter and lots and lots of snacks.

My drive to and from our meeting space had me traveling old country highways and somewhere in Kansas, I passed a sign for a Little House on the Prairie homestead, one that I don’t remember every noticing before. Talaura, Michael and I visited the homestead in South Dakota and we dragged the Cabbage to the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home in Mansfield MO, but I didn’t realize there was a place in Kansas so close to the OK border. So on my way home from the weekend, I followed the signs and took a detour. I was the only person in the parking space outside the homestead. It is currently closed for the winter, but you are still free to roam the property. There is a replica of the original log cabin built in 1870 by the Ingalls. The other buildings came later, after the Ingalls had moved back up to Pepin WI.

The Ingalls family moved around a lot and not from town to town. They moved state to state, which is impressive considering they were traveling by wagon.

As I made my way around the property, a very vague and dreamy memory kept nudging the back of my brain. I could have sworn a preschool version of me, along with a group of other preschoolers ran around this place like the feral children we were. I can almost hear the slightly stern voice of a woman trying to wrangle us up. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and juice boxes made up our picnic lunch. If this is a true memory, I can assure you that I was wearing a prairie inspired dress with a matching bonnet. I don’t know what my obsession with all things Little House is all about. I read all the books and watched the TV show and reruns of the TV show, but I don’t remember reading the books over and over the way I did Little Women. Yet there was, is, still something about prairie life that hooked me. I spent hours building an imaginary homestead in our pasture when I was little. I spent hours imagining living life on the prairie while I was actually living life on a prairie.

Building something from nothing.

I think this is what I am drawn too in these stories and the real places that birthed those stories. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family reinvented themselves over and over, move after move. When the first life they tried to build broke, they moved on to build a new life, starting practically from scratch each time. And there were times when it may have felt impossible to rebuild. There were times so awful, that Laura Ingalls Wilder couldn’t or wouldn’t write about them. Yet the family not only survived, but thrived so much so that we know their names and the stories Laura wrote feel like stories about our own grandparents. Life on the prairie forces resilience. I may have been raised in modern times, but I was still raised on prairie land. My high school’s neighbor was a dairy farm and we participated in more tornado drills than fire drills. Though, my HS was evacuated more than once due to wildfires. Bouquets of prairie flowers were clenched in my hands often wilting before I made it home from whatever pasture adventure I had been on. I know the tunes from the area songbirds.

I told Michael my plans for a moose hunt this summer and he is onboard for this adventure. We have started planning and plotting our route, a route that will take us very close to two other Laura Ingalls Wilder homesites. Homes I have yet to visit. I am placing pins in those towns with intentions for stopping on our way back home. I figure this could be my consolation for hunting imaginary creatures and coming up empty handed.

MEMORY TATTOOS

Mesas, buttes and volcanoes

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We needed a way to break up our drive time into five hour driving increments. Five or so hours to Alabaster Caverns for two nights. Five or so hours to Clayton NM for two nights. Five or so hours to Gunnison CO for three nights. This was our plan. All of our planned locations for this trip were places Michael had never been. Chris, Traci, her Chris and I used camp at Alabaster Caverns all the time. My gaze drifted down to the tent camping area often during our stay on this trip. Traci, remember that time you ended up throwing away your tent as we packed up to leave? We were still friends with James. He was there that weekend and it rained so much that we ended up trapped in our tents for a few hours. We borrowed a mop when the rain storm was over and mopped out our tents. That evening, a tarantula walked up and joined us around the campfire. It seemed like we were always there when a group of scouts were. We'd laugh at the sounds of the boys whooping and hollering as they stood under the cold outside shower, washing the layers of mud from their clothes from crawling through all the caves. Then there was the time Mom lost her cat there and we spent the day combing the area searching for it. We had permission to go all over the cave, off the main path. I found a whole skeleton of a horse tucked behind a large flat rock in one of the larger rooms.

There are three different ways to drive to Colorado. Two of those take you across Kansas. One takes you through the Oklahoma panhandle and into New Mexico before you turn north for Trinadad. As a kid and a young adult, I have travelled on all of these roads. My Dad's favorite path though, was the one that took us across the panhandle and into New Mexico. If you peeled away a layer of skin on my arm, you will find this map embedded there. Dad would drive the camper straight through the panhandle and stop in Capulin, NM for the night. At the time, or at least from what I remember from the last time we made that trip in 2006, the actual town of Capulin consisted of one campground and two rundown, abandoned buildings. The only reason the campground exists is because it is right across the street from the entrance to the Capulin Volcano National Monument. My Dad liked to stop here because he knew the guy who owned the campground. They had worked together once at American Airlines. Dad new a guy everywhere. The tradition was to spend the night in Capulin, get up early the next morning and hike the rim of the volcano before loading back up into the truck and heading on out to Colorado.

Most everything about this trip was so familiar. The roads traveled. The landscape. I knew exactly when to start looking for antelope. I knew which mounds of dirt to look at to see prairie dogs. I was unsurprised to see the roadrunners running down the fence line. I knew what time in the evening to start watching for bats to start flying around. The hot, dry, desert like air used to be the only kind of summer I knew. Baked earth. Baked skin. The way the inside of my nose always felt stuffy and on fire. Yet, there were new things too, things I'd never seen or experienced. I had never been inside Alabaster Caverns when there was so much water, enough to have a small water fall and pools of standing water with frogs and tiger striped salamanders. Even though I had been through Clayton, NM, I'd never stopped there. I had no idea that there were dinosaur tracks around Clayton lake or that they kept that lake stocked with trout. When we stopped to visit the Capulin Volcano, the National Park Visitor center was open. It didn't even exist the last time we were there. And of all the times we travelled across Hwy 160, we had never made the detour up to see the Great Sand Dunes.

This was the first time I'd been to Colorado and not caught a fish. Not a one. I left my Dad's ashes in Taylor River near our campground, part of me offering them as an appeasement to the Fish Gods. Instead the Fish Gods responded with "Oh...this guy. We remember this guy. He fished your limit a lifetime ago." Which is all true. If the limit was four fish per person and you only caught one fish, he caught the other three and said they were your's. He caught my limit of fish a lifetime ago. 

ECLIPSE 2017

Taken with the Nikon

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I am not even sure where to start this story. Talaura and her family had been planning this trip for well over a year with hotel bookings and finding an event viewing area. I started making plans with Talaura about her trip to KCMO and me tagging along with her and her family, way back before the new year. We had prepared for everything. We had sunscreen. We had water. We had camp chairs. We had snacks. Most importantly, we had our protective eyewear. We were prepared, but the one thing we could not prepare for was the weather. Weather is not easy to predict or plan for. I was looking at weather maps the week before. At that time, the weather in St. Joseph, the place we had planned for, did not look good, but two hours to the north west looked okay. We put Nebraska on our Plan B list. 

Monday morning, we got up early and glued ourselves to the news. Partial clouds. Possible thunderstorms. Poor visibility in Nebraska. Plan B was out. The local weather guy said that Marshal MO looked like the best viewing area for the eclipse. We kept this in mind as we loaded up our vehicles and headed out to the Rosecrans Memorial Airport. We spent an hour at the airport before deciding to head east. Talaura and I looked at the sky and both agreed that locking ourselves down in one spot with clouds moving in was not going to work. We convinced the others to load back up and head east. Then we hit rain. Heavy, heavy rain. Just when we thought we might be driving out of the worst of it, the rain would pick up and skies would get darker. Talaura and I spent the whole time frantic with worry that we had ruined this whole thing for everyone. We finally decided to turn around and just head for any glimpse of clear skies. 

Then we found it. A place in the clouds had opened up around the sun. We pulled over to the side of the road along with a few other cars and hoped out with our eclipse glasses on. The clouds broke open long enough for us to watch the partial eclipse move into totality and then we basked in that minute of darkness. Everyone cheered. We listed to the crickets. We felt the chill of the night time air. I snapped pictures and as I got a glance of some of the images I was getting, I was so excited and moved to tears. It was absolutely awe inspiring. I stopped taking pictures after totality and just watched. Then, it was over. The sun came out from behind the moon and the clouds moved back in along with more rain. The whole experience was the tallest emotional roller coaster that I've ridden in a very long time.

I am still a little stunned at our luck. If we had stayed put at the airport in St. Joseph, we would have missed the whole thing because of rain. If we had continued to head towards Marshal, we would have missed the whole thing because of rain. Yet, by some act of universal intervention or even a miracle, we were able to witness this unforgettable event. It was like the clouds parted just for us. 

IN DEFENSE OF PAPER MAPS

Getting our kicks

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It happened to Talaura and I when we were in Maine. Most of the time we couldn't get a cell signal while we were out driving around and we'd get stuck waiting for google maps to load so we could figure out where the heck we were. We finally gave up and bought an actual map. You know (or maybe you don't), the paper kind of map that teaches you patience when it's time to fold back up. For those of you who have no idea about paper maps, I am real sorry. My dad had paper maps stashed everywhere. He had a large basket stuffed full of them next to his recliner. The glovebox of his truck was like one of those gag peanut cans but with maps instead of springs. Every truck pocket was jammed full with paper maps and the dashboard would also be littered with them. It drove my mother crazy. 

Michael and I had the same problems with cell service and maps while we were in Wisconsin. Also, that area had gotten a storm a few days prior to our visit that caused flash flooding. Roads and bridges had been washed away. So there was this square of odd and confusing detours that took you down tiny roads that were sometimes paved and sometimes gravel. I took our paper map in with us when we stopped at the Northern Great Lakes Visitors Center and the rangers there were able to highlight a route for us that would take us around closed roads. Sunday morning, when we left Randy and Katrina's, we decided to stay on Route 66 as long as we could and avoid the interstates completely. After looking at maps on my phone for about ten minutes, I said "I don't want to do this one my phone!" I was tired and part of my brain was still gunky from all the limoncello I'd had the night before. So, Michael pulled over and bought one Oklahoma map and one Missouri map and then we proceeded to take the longest possible way home.

It was glorious. We traveled along most Route 66 all the way into Baxter Springs, KS and then followed Hwy 69 up through Kansas and on into the city. We stopped at a roadside fruit stand and bought fresh corn and peaches. We wandered around Ed Galloway's Totem Pole Park and admired a corvette club traveling through from Illinois. We saw a bicyclist pulled over near an old ranch. We noticed that the cyclist was prepared for a long haul with large saddle bags and a small trailer. We turned around to check on him because we'd just heard the weatherman say something about a heat index of 102. The cyclist was an older Japanese man who did not speak much english. We made sure that he was OK and that he had enough water and then we left him there wishing we'd asked him way more questions. It's my biggest regret of yesterday. I regret not getting his picture. I regret not finding out where he was on his trip. Did he start in California or Chicago? I really regret not getting his story. 

We travelled on to Baxter Springs where we stopped in at the Historic Vintage Service Station to buy a pin and a car sticker. We spent some time talking with Dean "Crazy Legs" Walker who was manning the station. He told us how to get out to the Rainbow Bridge and about where to see the original tow truck that inspired Mater. We drove out to the bridge and took pictures and then we headed north towards Ft. Scott. We stopped at the Fort and got stamps in our National Parks Passport and all along the way, we discussed the logistics of doing a scooter trip of Route 66. Michael kept talking about needing some sort of support driving team for parts where we can't ride on 66 and how we'd have to do it two trips. I think he's making it more complicated than it needs to be. We pack light, rent a Uhaul to get us to Chicago with the scooters, ride the scooters to California and the rent a Uhaul to drive them back to KCMO. Done. If that guy can fit all the things he needed for the trip into a tiny bicycle trailer and two bags, we can fit everything on the scooters. 

It took us about eight hours to get home yesterday when usually that's about a four hour drive. We were exhausted by the time we made it home and in the back of my head, I was a little annoyed with myself for not pushing to get us home sooner. I'm behind on laundry and the bathroom needs to be cleaned. We both had things to get ready for work the next day. Instead, we moved at a snail's pace.

And we had the best day.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The other night, I stepped outside to walk to the car after yoga class and I noticed that the air smelled almost sweet. It was the same smell that follows a gentle Spring or early Summer rain. I popped my head up to look out through the parking garage and that's when I saw that it was indeed raining. Later on in the evening that rain would turn into teeny tiny snow flakes and leave everything outside looking like it had been dusted with flour. But in that small moment, still hazy from final relaxation, I could almost believe that it was Spring and that if I looked out I would see tulips and daffodils. I know that it was just a tease. Today there is no doubt that it is winter. Little snow flakes decorate my weather widget for the next couple of days. Yes, I was being teased by mother nature, but I was also once again being reminded that Winter's days are numbered. I'm thankful for that reminder. February has passed like the blink of an eye and we are heading into March roaring like a lion. We've all made it this far. I think we'll survive to see the tulips at the end of March. 

I am thankful for many things on this last Friday of February besides the promise of Spring. Today, maybe even as you're reading this, I am traveling to Oklahoma to celebrate the union of Misti and Mark (or Mark and Misti, M&M). I am thankful that Misti has found a partner who makes her life happy. It is unfortunate that Michael and the Cabbage aren't able to go. We just couldn't get the scheduling worked out, but I will not be traveling to Oklahoma alone! I nudged Talaura into flying to KCMO and riding to Oklahoma with me. She and her little dog (with a big heart) Sarge will be keeping me company as I drive us through the great Flint Hills of Kansas. The last time Talaura flew to KCMO and drove with me to Oklahoma it was for Chris's celebration of life service. Not really the best trip. Sort of sad and funny at the same time because we do have a good sense of humor. But it's nice to be making this trip for much happier reasons. I'm thankful to have Talaura and Sarge's company for the drive down. We chat just about every day, but it's not the same as seeing her face and being able to hug her neck. 

Lots of things happening this weekend. Apparently we're traveling into some weather, but I haven't really paid much attention to that. I'm thankful that I learned to drive on icy roads and now have experience in snowy conditions. I do not for see any travel problems. I have good company for the ride down. This is all that really matters. I am thankful for a weekend where we all can gather to celebrate love. Really celebrate. I know, as we grow older, we are more likely to gather to celebrate a life of a loved one lost. That's just the way of things. So these moments where we can all come together for no other reason but to share in the joy of the legally binding of two households are moments to squeeze and hold tight. 

I am thankful that Josephine was not a jerk to Sarge. I am thankful that I successfully completed my latest assignment for Python class without any outside help (I'm learning to write code! Not to be confused with write in code. Running computers kind of code.). I am thankful for you. 

Here's to a weekend of great joy and a super duper Thankful Friday!