Again we are off, this time to western Pennsylvania and Bill’s family.
It’s a long and beautiful trip through endless West Virginia, and again it will be good to feel the road between here and that other home. The packing is mostly done. Tomorrow morning I will finish the last details, hopefully the children and I will do some cleaning, and then, at 9 or so, we will be off.
Away to the Appalachian foothills, with the earth rolling under and away from us, farms and farmland and rusted steel mill towns. Away to the gleaming city of Pittsburgh sitting astride her gleaming rivers. It is a city of stunning beauty: a shiny, sprawling cathedral, home of my hallowed childhood. I love to look at it, pulling delicately in my mind at the gentle bonds of my exile.
Away to Bill’s father, dear man, to whom I will forever be grateful because he produced my husband. He has become, as is appropriate, my second father. I love his growl, his sudden laugh, his scrambled eggs, and the way he never says anything bad about anybody.
And away to Bill’s stepmother who, in my fifteen years of marriage to one of her seven sons, has most definitely become My Friend. I love her laughter, her jokes, her open mind, and her willingness to snack with me At Any Time.
We will attend Bill’s twentieth high school reunion. That should be Interesting. We will, hopefully, visit a pair of our oldest friends who are shortly to become parents to their fifth child. And, if we can swing it, we will see three of my former students. I taught them eleven years ago now, when they were in the Eighth Grade.
There is more that I want to do. I want to go to the South Hills of Pittsburgh, to the church where Bill and I were married. I want to see the many friends we still have there. I want to take the children to a Pirates game and to the park where the three rivers come together. I want to ring the doorbell of the house where I grew up. I want to drive around and look at things and remember.
But we will be home, I think, on Wednesday. And perhaps I will be thinking, as I so often do when coming home from there, that it wouldn’t be so very hard to move back again, would it?
