This post was originally published on this site.
Happy Friday friends,
I am supposed to be going on vacation this evening, through at least next week. I say supposed to be because the plans are a bit up in the air right now.
My version of a break consists of repairing to a particular corner of Western Pa., from whence hail my mother’s clan, and spending as much time clustered around a muddy puddle of a lake with as many of my family, immediate and extended, as I can manage.
It is, in the best sense, in the middle of nowhere. That is to say there is nothing to draw anyone there who isn’t in some way from there. I can’t claim to be from there, strictly speaking, though my family have been there since my great-great grandfather’s time. And I have gone there every summer of my life, bar one when I was in the Holy Land for an extended stay back in 2000 — a story for another time maybe.
For me, having seen the total terraforming of my childhood neighborhood in Chicago and the literal demolition of the house where we lived in the UK, the ramshackle lakehouse built by my grandparents is the only fixed point on the
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