Thoughts on the Connecticut Shoreline

Along the Connecticut shoreline lies a vast tract of salt marsh. Tonight, while riding the train from Boston to New York, the marshes revealed themselves through low-lying fog; the waterways that cut through the reeds and grasses shimmered in the heat and haze.

I love the salt marsh because it is an eerie, subtle, but changeable landscape. The marsh transforms itself with a limited range of colors and plant life: in the summer, the grasses are bright green and lush; in the fall the color fades to brown; in the winter, the grasses die and the waterways freeze to hard, silver paths. There are no bright colors, no shocking contrasts between spring, summer, fall, and winter. The landscape only reveals itself over time. I feel a kinship with it because I've watched it morph from my train window, back and forth, season after season.

North

So it's 9:10pm and Stephen and I are taking bets on how late it'll be before the sun sets up north here...I'm thinking 10ish. Oooh--through the wonder that is the internet, we've just discovered that sunset here in Thunder Bay (48.35 degrees latitude) will occur at 10:04, and that it will finally get *dark at, um, 10:44pm.

I love North. :)

Little House on the Prairie...

Just a quick post--after spending 11.5 hours on the road yesterday driving from Buffalo to Champaign, we have arrived on the prairie. Today we spent a most wonderful day playing with Isabel (who is 4), eating lunch outside on the porch, watching Jason mow the lawn, and all sorts of other exciting activities unknown to dwellers in small, urban apartments. (Can I just say that I will be returning home on a quest to find a place we can live that has a dishwasher? And why is it that helping other people do dishes makes one feel good, but doing one's own dishes is an unbearable chore?)

Low Bridge, Everybody Down....

I have to admit (Karen, stop laughing right now) that I find "journey is the destination travel" travel challenging. It's difficult to shift the gears in my brain from must-get-there/finish-this/do-that mode to being-where-I-am mode. The only time I can really achieve that feeling is when I'm traveling by train between New York and Boston. That trip always feels like suspended time, where I'm off the grid and don't have to pay attention to life's details. I can knit or read or write without guilt.

Yesterday's drive seemed to pass like a dream--a long, hazy, humid vision of green fields and the smell of grass. We cut through upstate New York via Route 79 and 96; there are still portions of 79 that remain unchanged from the time my family would drive from Danvers to Ithaca to visit my Aunt and Uncle and favorite cousins. Parts of central New York feel like a second homeland because I've driven through them in so many different stages of my life--childhood, college, grad school, now.

But what's causing my brain to stutter is that we're continuing on shortly--it feels hard to be here in Buffalo knowing that on Tuesday we set off for Illinois. And I keep thinking forward forward forward--to what Thunder Bay, Ontario, will look like, or how long it will take us to drive from Ottawa back to Jersey City. Then I start to think about how two weeks seems so *long...a long time to be away from work, the house, the cats, the routines that define my life.

I don't remember feeling this way when we were in Berlin last summer, or on any of my trips to London or Amsterdam. But perhaps that's because we traveled to those places, created a home base, and explored from there. This trip is more nomadic. And I've never wanted to be a nomad. To travel, see the world, explore--yes. But to feel at home wherever I am--that's the challenge.