Road Trip with Ma and Pa

Dam, we did it

Most people go to Las Vegas for the gambling and the high life. They go to win money. They go for a lost weekend with a lover or with friends for fun and frolic. 

I went with my mom and dad on a road trip to see art. Specifically, the Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum.

We set off from LA. I had arrived from Toronto the day before and over dinner we discussed what time was reasonable to get going. My map app told me the journey would take just over four hours. 

"Let's start early," my mother said. 

"What's early?" I asked.

"Nine," she said with decision. 

My mother typically does not get out of bed much before noon; my father shook his head dubiously. We began a weird sort of backward bargaining. 

"How about let's be happy if we leave by noon," I suggested.

"No, we can leave by ten," Mom said.

"Eleven?" I offered. 

My father went upstairs to pack.

Miracles happen. We were all in the car at 10:50 a.m. A good omen.

"Oh no," my mom said as I buckled up.

"What?" 

"I left my coffee inside."

So close. I sighed and undid my seatbelt. "Where is it?"

"Never mind. It's fine. I don't need it." My mother is like this, endlessly self-abnegating. (The opposite of me.) 

"I'll get it," I said. "Just give me the housekey."

"You have it," she said. "It's attached to the car key."

"No, it's not." I demonstrated, waving the keyless fob. "Dad, do you have your key?" 

"No," he said, grimly. Dismay pervaded the atmosphere, less about being totally locked out--several people have spares-- but at the shadow cast by error and the consequent reduction of the goodness of the omen. 

Then came redemption. By sheer chance I had brought along my own key from Toronto and zipped it into a small pocketbook. And again by chance, I had brought this little bag along for the road trip and shoved it in my suitcase. Whew! I burrowed through the boot, found the key, and retrieved the still-hot coffee. We were ready to ride... at exactly eleven o' clock. 

We plowed our way along the Ventura Freeway, the 101 becoming the 134, then climbed out of the LA basin. Snowcapped peaks to the left overlooked our progress past Hesperia and then Victorville, into the desolate terrain of the Mojave desert. My mother, age 92, sighed happily. "I just love traveling by car."

Worth it, the whole trip, for that alone. 

I love my mom.

*****

We stopped in Barstow, the "Hub of the West", for lunch at Roy's Café, on Main Street, a fragment of old Route 66 and the southern Mormon trail. A series of murals commemorate the town's history (caveat: some a tad dicey IMHO). 

The Barstow story

Get your kicks...

...or not

In Las Vegas the GPS pointed us to our hotel just off the Strip though it insisted we get there via the (gated) employee car park. Friendly locals directed us to the guest entrance and soon thereafter, our rooms. Very Vegas views: flashing neon lights in the foreground, desert and mountains beyond, and directly below, a tempting swimming pool. 

But my dad had eyes only for one thing: his mobility scooter. Walking has become painful for him due to a spinal condition so he has been using a rollator (we named her Stella) for the past few months, which helps. My sisters and I have encouraged him to explore scooters but he hesitated. However, he took to this one like a duck to the proverbial. He mastered forward and reverse and hardly ran into anything. (He didn't really come close to that woman with a baby buggy-- honest.) 

After a delicious dinner at a Japanese restaurant my parents wanted to hit the Strip so we set off for a post-prandial tour. ("Here," said my mom as we traversed a casino at the MGM Grand. "Bet on something." She handed me $20. I handed it back, betting that we'd have more fun getting out of the place. Plus, the casinos seem entirely electronic and incompatible with paper money.)  I found myself jogging to keep up as my father disappeared into the middle distance on his electric steed. We strayed further than I meant us too and my mother wore out. Las Vegas is, however, set up for hospitality--those friendly locals. A kind parking valet at a random hotel called a cab for my mom, while I jog-walked alongside my speed-demon dad back to our own hotel.

Speed demon Dad

The native New Yorker

Quick casino transit

The next night we visited The Sphere, a new installation / venue shaped like--yes--a globe. Inside they display audiovisual magic aka technology with robots and other AI. The staff at The Sphere made the experience magical for us too; I called their accessibility office about two hours before our show to ask whether we would be better off with my dad's walker or (somehow) his scooter. "No worries!" said the friendly young man on the end of the phone. "We'll provide you a wheelchair and an escort!" And they did, a big gray-bearded man, Mark, who it seems attended the high school down the road from me. Mark told us quite a lot about himself (too much, according to my mother), including that his father used to play drums for Bob Hope's band and that as a child, he would tag along. Now by his accounting he's some sort of property mogul, one who apparently likes to serve as a wheelchair escort on the side. I have no idea whether any of it was true but then again, what is truth? He got us to the front of several queues, which is more important than truth. 

My 94-year-old Dad conversed with Lia the robot and proved to be the absolute star of the show. Hilarious and smart. If I could figure out how to add a video to this blog I would show him off but you'll have to take my word. I do love my dad.

Inside the sphere...

It's a sphere

But the main event, the one that drew us to Las Vegas in the first place, was a visit to the Ruth Deanin Abbey Museum, a work of love jointly created by Rita and her husband (now widower) Robert Belliveau.

Rita died in 2021. She was one of my mother's numerous (as in, one of over 35) first cousins in and around Brooklyn in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Like my mother, Rita moved west and settled there: my parents to California, Rita to New Mexico and also to California and eventually to Nevada. She became a multi-media artist and a poet, and for a time the only woman professor of art at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. 

Rita married Edward Abbey, a writer and environmental activist who wrote novels and essays including The Monkey Wrench Gang (about a ragtag band of people determined to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam) and The Brave Cowboy, on which the classic western film Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas, was based  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey]. Rita and Edward had two sons, Joshua and Aaron, who were my occasional playmates when both my father and theirs were at Stanford University--my father as a graduate student and theirs as a creative-writing fellow. My parents told me that we used to visit the Abbeys when they lived in Half Moon Bay, on the coast between Palo Alto and San Francisco. Once Rita offered to lend my parents one of her paintings to cheer up their dowdy married-student Stanford University apartment. "Which way up does it go?" my father asked her.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," Rita said airily. 

But some time later when the Abbeys paid a return visit to us in Stanford Village, Rita glanced at her painting and chastised my father. "You've hung it upside down!" He has told this story a few times now and I still can't work out whether he is joking or she was or if both were in complete earnest.

Rita's painting

Sculpture garden

In the museum he told the story again, this time also to my cousin Aaron who joined us at the museum. Laura Sanders, the amazing director, arranged everything and gave us a personal tour. We swapped stories about Rita. I shared a childhood memory of Rita after she had divorced Edward and visited us with her boyfriend in Los Angeles when I was about six or seven. The couple had gone scuba diving in Santa Monica Bay and had returned to our apartment with a bucket of live lobsters. My mother duly boiled a pot of water. I heard her scream and ran into the kitchen. A lobster had escaped from captivity and had caught her bare toe in its claw. The boyfriend ("that would be Merrick," says Aaron at the museum) pried it off and I accompanied my mother to the bathroom where she applied a bandaid. 

We looked at Rita's amazing art and visited her studio and talked family history. My mother gave names to the sepia-tinted faces in a long-ago group photograph. "That's my mother," she said, pointing out my grandmother as a youngster.

Glowing stained glass 

On our last day my father had to bid farewell to his new favorite friend, the mobility scooter, and return to the plodding effort of walking with Stella. We detoured on the way home to Hoover Dam, which I had never seen. Lake Mead shone in the brilliant blue sunshine, an actual body of water rather than the sea of solar tiles that had fooled me a few days earlier. The dam is a tremendous and breathtaking construction but I could not help wondering about the view back when the Colorado River flowed through, before the dam amputated its course. Would we build it today? 

Lake Mead 

Oops?

Not the Colorado River...

After a lunch stop at the Dam Cafe we headed west into the sunset, back to Los Angeles. A few days later I returned to Toronto. Next stop, England. "Globetrotter," my cousin Laura called me. I don't feel it. I'm just a gal looking for her homes. 

Lonely Are the Brave

Travels with Myself

A classic advertisement said, "You're not getting older, you're getting better." I don't recall what it was selling-- face cream? Hair dye? But I am here to attest that it is true, in some ways at least. 

In September I clicked along the railroad tracks of Europe, most definitely doing it better than I did back in  my youth.

It all started with a wedding: our nephew married his beloved, and the extended family gathered in the heart of Tuscany to celebrate with the couple and their friends. A joyous occasion indeed. The icing on the cake for us was getting to spend three precious days with our children, plus girlfriend, in an 'agriturismo' villa perched on a hillside overlooking acres of vines and distant olive trees, only a 30-minute dusty, bumpy, scenic drive from villa to wedding venue (the rental car guy told us that in Tuscany people are too busy making wine to pave their roads). Eldest son found and organized the accommodation; those parenting tables are turning. We arrived from three corners of the globe-- Toronto, Vancouver, and Utrecht--to converge on Rome. It had seemed too precarious a plan to work but it did.

All together now (Castelnuovo dell'Abate, Tuscany)

After we dispersed I found myself on my own with no obligations and the continent beckoning. The last time such a thing happened was decades ago in my student days.

I had Europe at my feet and chose to keep it there, staying on the ground: my ticket to ride then as now was a train pass. Then, I had a student Interrail card in the shape of a small paper booklet good for nearly unlimited travel for a month, a laden backpack, a small stack of travelers checks, and no one to answer to. 

Traveller's cheque on display at the British Museum

Back in the student era, my idea was to spend as little money as possible. Competitive thrift seemed to be the order of the day. We undergrads reconvened after our holiday travels and told tales of touring Roman ruins and Notre Dame and bragged about the cheapest places to stay and sneaking an extra--usually stale-- roll from the continental breakfast service to save for lunch along with an apple or tomato from a greengrocer. I don't know why I was so miserly. I was not poor; my parents were not mean. I set out from the University of Sussex for a three-week backpacking trip across Western Europe in December and January of my year abroad with three hundred pounds in traveller's cheques and my rail card. I came home with much of the money untouched, having gone hungry some of the time and sleeping in a few appalling hostels. I remember I skipped a visit Versailles because it was too expensive. Once I nearly found myself marooned for a night in the Milan train station and was rescued through the unutterable kindness of strangers. I really was supremely lucky. Some of the time I traveled with friends, other times on my own, partly by choice and partly by misadventure. I look back on various terrible decisions I made and shudder in shock and awe that I did not suffer any worse fate than occasional cold, hunger, and discomposure. 

This journey could not have been more different. I purchased a senior Eurail pass rather than a student one--and first-class at that (not much more expensive)--in digital rather than paper form, good for 5 days of travel in a month, requiring more thought and planning. I carried a credit card instead of cash. Add a mobile phone with travel plan, and voilà, I was ready to ride, armed and far less endangered than last time.

I still found occasion to chat with kind strangers. And I still was not extravagant-- my tastes are not extravagant, I guess--but nor did I go hungry and or inhabit grimy hostels. I lived well and had fun. I ate wonderful food and imbibed delightful drinks both caffeinated and alcoholic. I sampled the ice cream at every destination. I visited castles and markets and towers and museums and took boat rides and though I travelled solo, I also spent time with friends. I loved every single city on my itinerary: Rome, Venice, Salzburg, Prague, Berlin, Utrecht/ Amersfoort/ Amsterdam/ Den Haag (the Netherlands is small).

 

As easy as ABCDE

Rome's Forum where a seagull stole my ice cream cone

Ice cream, ice cream, everywhere. Luckily.

My suitcase and I traversing Venice

Friendship in Venice 💝

Train life

Salzburg from on high

🔎 Mysterious: Prague public library

Prague: Kafka's head. It moves, but I can't get the video to upload.

Berlin Wall with friends from Clare Hall 💕💕

My final destination was the Netherlands, where I visited middle child in his new habitat in the charming city of Utrecht. Although I had seen him only two weeks earlier at the Italian wedding, it was such a pleasure to see him again and in situ in his new faraway (I hope temporarily) home. He guided me with grace and confidence and a startling ability to navigate both Utrecht and Amsterdam. I was granted excellent hospitality with a long-time (these days I find myself careful about saying 'old') and very precious friend in nearby Amersfoort. 

Utrecht. The Dom and the son.

Kattenkabinet in Amsterdam

Amsterdam by night

The Hague, outside the Mauritshuis, with sweet friends and son 💜💛💚💙

Then too few days later, on the first of October, I flew across the ocean back to Canada. As a last hurrah, my flight involved a long-enough layover in Montréal to enjoy a sunny afternoon in the old city by the St. Lawrence River. A perfect ending. 

Last stop: Vieux Montréal

Getting older (sometimes) is getting better. 

Salzburg. What would Mozart order? At a guess: 'ein skinny triple shot oat milk latte, bitte'

Venice, last vaporetto ride. Arrivederci, Europe.

"This is Canada!"

Returning home to Toronto after a year in Cambridge has been both a delight and a shock. Delightful: kids, pets, friends, garden, lake. Shocking: bright lights, big city, traffic, road rage. I find myself squinting in the glare of speeding cars and reckless drivers. The anti-cyclist (and anti-pedestrian) mentality and movement have grown even as--perhaps because--the city itself takes gradual steps toward bike and pedestrian-friendliness...ie to get to where Cambridge already is.   

When our family first landed in Toronto 13 years ago the friendliness and kindliness of the denizens impressed us. People stopped to offer help when we looked confused, they chatted pleasantly in shops. "They're so nice!" we marveled. Then we discovered the exception: Torontonians on wheels. Any wheels: riders as well as drivers ("Beware Canucks on Wheels" (2015)). Just yesterday, walking with husband and daughter, I had to dodge a cyclist on the sidewalk heading toward us, at night, no lights. "What are you doing? There's a bike lane right there," I pointed.

"Kiss my ass," said the man as he shot past.

"No, thank you," husband responded.

The aggro amongst street users has definitely ratcheted up. I read the odd snippet of Toronto transit news while in England. Now evidence of my own eyes confirms these reports. Toronto has, bless it, laid on more bike lanes (still not enough), installed more cycling and pedestrian infrastructure (still not enough), and funded more enforcement against bike-lane blockage (never enough). There's a new mayor in office, Olivia Chow, who rides her bike to City Hall. Things are trending in the right direction for cycling...at the mild expense of driver convenience and speed.

Good, say I. And yes I say that even when I am a driver. City driving should NOT be convenient or speedy. It should not be fun. It should be a thing one does as a last resort.

Others disagree and disagree strongly. People in Toronto (and in its suburbs) really like their cars.  They like them large and bulky and prominent and they want to use them to go fast. They're furious. I found this out twice last week.

Son injured his ankle and needed medical advice so, our doctor being away, I drove him to a walk-in clinic. I nosed most of the way in to a tight space right in front of the building and put on my flashers. Husband helped son hop into the building while I stayed with the car until we knew whether he could be seen. A minute later, behind me, a driver honked, her front bumper near my rear one. I wasn't sure why, as there was plenty of room to maneuver around me in the road. Eventually the driver pulled up next to me, blocking traffic, and rolled down the passenger window of her SUV. 

"I want to park there," she informed me. 

"Well, I'm waiting for someone."

"But I want to park. You haven't paid yet."

I stared at her. This young woman was ordering me to move so she could put her car where mine was.

"I'll be another few minutes," I repeated. 

"Then you should pay," she snapped, as though expecting me to drop coins directly into her palm.

"There's a grace period," I told her. "Ten minutes."

"I never heard that."

"Check the website," I said. (I am pretty sure I'm right. In any case, with luck the annoying woman will waste at least ten minutes googling it.)

"And you're idling," she accused.

"You're right." I turned off the motor and switched on the radio. "There you go." She drove away. I could practically see the huff in her exhaust.

Honestly. I cannot imagine a Canadian not in a car marching up to me and saying "I want your place in line. Move." But put them on wheels, and you get a different story. 

A little later the same day I met a friend for lunch at a nearby café. As we walked along a small street in my neighborhood, she and I watched an enormous blood-red pick-up truck reverse from the road into a driveway. As my friend and I edged along the strip of sidewalk left us by the driver, he started pulling forward, toward us. I lifted my hand to make us visible-- the truck's hood was about as high as my head--and craned my neck to make eye contact. The man rolled down his window to shout at me as we crossed to safety. "Hey! You don't always have the right of way! This is Canada!"

'This is Canada'? What? My friend and I looked at each other and laughed in disbelief.

The driver of the scarlet truck was of course right. It is true; this is Canada. Also it is true that I personally do not always have the right of way. But right then, right there, walking north on the sidewalk of Major Street, I, along with my friend--plus another woman walking south-- most certainly did have both the right of way and extreme vulnerability. What the driver had was a bloody big pick-up and a Y chromosome. 

Again, he might be a perfectly nice man when parted from his vehicle.

Or possibly not. Several months ago I read about a group of people deliberately blocking a bike lane newly installed on an iconic north-south Toronto thoroughfare, Yonge Street. Grown men and women had actually taken time out of their day to stand in an active bike lane in a city, forcing cyclists into traffic, in an effort to make cycling less safe and thus less popular. 

This is Canada?

Scotty, beam me up. Or perhaps just beam me back to Cambridge.

Who knows what comes next. My belief is that bike-riding will help save the world and that personally-owned cars will soon go the way of the dodo. The fact that the luddites amongst us are reacting so strongly against this change is perhaps an indicator of its eventual success. But the divisiveness in the meantime is scary and unpleasant and, I believe, profoundly un-Canadian. 

There are also signs of hope (the new cycling mayor of Toronto for instance) and, even more powerful, signs of humor:

Toronto's 'Crosswalk Referee' 

This too is Canada. 

Maybe it will help. 

And maybe the dodo will come back.

Laundry lore

We are back in Toronto, busy unpacking and setting our house to rights, a project that I fear may take us forever. We have too much stuff, a situation made clearer by our year of living sparely at Clare Hall. 

We managed perfectly well without the detritus that fills our space here at home. Clutter, I guess it could be called, or memorabilia. As we unpack and organize, I find myself tossing things out left, right, and center. Flip-flops bought in Tanzania now chewed by the dog? Cozy sweater from Edinburgh's Greenmarket pocked with intransigent stains? Harris Ranch mug with a chipped rim? Begone. 

The kids and the pets have made the cut. We're keeping them. It is very lovely having most of them close, and all of them nearer time-zone-wise (for the moment). And there are certainly some inanimate possessions with which we have had a happy reunion (books, art, coffee grinder, sofa). 

The  laundry room is one part of the house I am especially happy to return to-- in spite of the Everest-like pile of towels and linens. When I first learned that husband and I would be using a communal laundry facility for our year at Clare Hall, I quaked and hunted for laundry services in Cambridge that offered pick up and delivery. Impossible otherwise, I said to husband. I am way too old to put on shoes and coat and traipse through corridors in the cold and wet to wait my turn for a machine. 

Barefoot laundering

The reality, as so often, proved less daunting than I feared. Getting to the laundry room in Clare Hall did  not demand rain gear; the route was covered. We rarely waited for a machine. Even when we did, the experience was convivial; sharing facilities with people you know and like has its pleasures. Nonetheless, washing clothes involved planning and time management and being dressed. One delight of returning home is the ability to do laundry unshod and unclad at any time of day or night. 

But home laundry was not always so easy. When I first moved to England, way back when, I was shocked to discover that most washing machines lived in kitchens, under the counter, next to the tiny fridge, in exactly the spot where the (nonexistent) dishwasher should have lived. 

"Why is the washing machine in the kitchen?" I asked my friend and housemate, Kate. She was bemused by my question. 

"Where else would it go?" she shrugged.

Certainly not next to the dryer, which, like the dishwasher, did not exist in most houses (back then more so, but still even now). In Britain, I discovered, laundry is sent to try you. Convenience is less valued, to the extent that a desire for it is regarded with some suspicion. Laundry remains (in my experience) very much the province of the woman in the household, and cynically I cannot help but sense oppression. I may be wrong. (But I may not.) I also detect some brainwashing. My female friends often seemed to argue against their own best interests. 

'Clothes that dry in sunshine smell so much fresher,' I would hear other mums say. Sunshine? What sunshine, I wondered, as friends abandoned trolleys full of groceries at Sainsbury's in order to race home and remove bedsheets from the clothesline ahead of a downpour. Reliable sun is a rare commodity in that green land. And what about the excrement of passing birds? Plus it takes forever to peg clothes, linens, and towels to a washing-line, where they dry hard as boards, requiring aggressive ironing -- another favourite time-consuming British (women's) pastime in which I declined to partake.

The first household appliance my husband and I jointly purchased was a dryer, at my behest. However I consented to a condenser-dryer, a device I have only ever encountered in the UK, which rather than being vented to the outdoors, collects moisture in a plastic tank that needs to be removed and emptied every couple of cycles. Yes, yet more work. We kept ours in a tiny upstairs room while the washing machine (of course) lived in the kitchen, necessitating an awkward upward trek clutching a basket of heavy wet laundry. 

These condenser drying contraptions are only slightly less evil than the combination washer-dryers that satanic manufacturers foist on hopeful, unsuspecting consumers. Kate and I briefly shared one. It worked fine as long as you only washed one item at a time. I exaggerate, but not a lot.

My mother-in-law had a large house with plenty of unused space-- in fact there were whole rooms kept locked and untouched-- but still her washing machine (a washer-dryer) resided in the kitchen. She did own a separate full-sized dryer but it crouched at the farthest, darkest end of the detached and unheated garage. This placement necessitated toting a heavy basket of wet clothes from house to garage and then either slithering between the garage wall and the parked car, or first moving the car out to the driveway. It seemed to me that she had said yes to that dryer only grudgingly, while ensuring that doing laundry still constituted hard labour. The British way. Stiff upper lip and mustn't grumble-- which means there must be something about which not to grumble. 

I recalled this little laundry history because of a piece I read recently by Kirsten Bell, an American who has turned an ethnographic eye on UK laundry culture. Kudos to Kirsten. When I read her article I laughed until I cried. Yes, I thought. She has nailed it (or perhaps clothes-pinned it). After I closed the tab I stood and walked, unshod and pajama-clad, to my laundry room where I moved the wet towels from the washer into the dryer and filled the washing machine with sheets. 

Now to unpack one more box before bedtime...

They're multiplying

Getting there

 PS My research on laundry services in Cambridge did not go to waste; I shared it with a friend living in a different college, one with apparently very inferior laundry facilities. He was grateful.

Winding down and packing up: 'Farewell to England!'

Our Year of Living Academically is coming to an end. Next week we say goodbye to Cambridge and hello to Toronto (at least if our tickets are valid. We have doubts. But that's another story).

The boxes have arrived and the suitcases have been pulled from storage. Their mouths gape open, hungry for our possessions, which seem to have increased in orders of magnitude from the four pieces of checked luggage we brought from Canada. Books, boots, bits and bobs; it all adds up. Now we need to organize, pack, ship, and cry. I'm not quite as overwrought as Byron in his poem ("Heart-broken and lorn, I resign/ The joys and the hopes that thou gavest") but I certainly have emotional moments.

Byron in the Wren Library, Trinity College

As I pack, I run through a litany of memories and think of what I'll miss about living in Cambridge.

Clare Hall

Well, everything. 

• Our home from home, flat 17, Clare Hall
• Casual conversations daily in the dining hall on subjects ranging from Bach's obsession with numbers, to advances in material science around hip replacement, to views on brotherhood from the perspectives of anthropology and of classics, and so on--- all before dessert and coffee. 

• The dining hall. Being cooked for by creative chefs. Mushroom stroganoff for lunch! Thai curry for dinner! Soup every day!
• So many people at Clare Hall and beyond who have become friends and inspirations.
• Proximity to old friends who knew me back when, who knew my children as babies, whose life histories are part of my own.
• Weird though it may sound, the NHS, which served us very well when we needed it most.
• Weird though it may sound, the climate. 
• The dozens or hundreds of concerts and lectures and seminars (who knew historiography could be so intriguing?) advertised on laminated posters affixed to railings and posts: Cambridge's local internet is the inter-fence

• The River Cam.

• Riding bikes in a city where cycling infrastructure works. 

• The people who stay here. 

Neighbours 

• The people who visit.

• The swimming pool.

• Springtime in college gardens.

• Location, location, location: an hour to London, two to Brighton, three to Durham (well, four with the ever-present roadworks)
• East Anglia: north Norfolk--Walsingham! Cley!--and rural Suffolk, their coasts, pockets of Essex and Cambridgeshire. Sky and more sky.

Lavenham, Suffolk

Cley-next-the-Sea, Norfolk

• Trains
• Walks and runs along fields and paths, from right outside our door

• Not living in a big city. Turns out I'm not a big-city person. It's taken me a while to realise.
• Europe on the doorstep.
• The timezone advantage that has let me write in the mornings and work in the afternoons.
• The people. Again.
• This year-long adventure à deux  ♡

On the other side of goodbyes, of course, will be the hellos. What I am looking forward to in Toronto:

• Reunion with our kids (until they dissipate, leaving us in the empty nest--unlike this past year, when we left them)
• Reunion with the dog and two cats (a very close second to seeing the kids. In fact... no, I won't go there)
• Reading the paper in bed surrounded by the dog and two cats
• Settling back into our galumphing old house 
• Reclaiming my houseplants (thank you to everyone who kept them going)
• Wrestling with the scraggly neglected garden (hint to husband: how about a new garden bench for our anniversary?)
• Connecting with friends and neighbors and colleagues in real life (hey folks, please can we go for a coffee? An ice cream? A cocktail? Soon?)
• Greater proximity to my North American family; seeing many of them next week for...
• ...middle child's graduation ceremony!
• Cooking meals (though not the associated washing up). So many new Nigel Slater recipes to try, plus the Alice B. Toklas cookbook.
• Dining and drinking on restaurant patios unassailed by cigarette smoke.
• Living on a continent with a Pacific coast. 

Bridge over the River Cam 
July 2022

This week the farewell gatherings come thick and fast, punctuating the packing up. There will be tears before leaving for sure, but also bright hope for return. In the meantime, I believe I've ordered enough Sainsbury's own-brand tea to see us through the transition to Toronto. 

Thank you, Clare Hall, for everything. À bientôt. 

Full moon from Flat 17