My mom had been within the border of every state before she was twenty-one. In 1952, they were all still contiguous. Her friends told her she should appear on the TV show "I've Got a Secret."
Annie's family lives in Indiana, and we were last there in 2009 for Thanksgiving. I loved Indiana farmland the way you love someplace you'll never have to live. The silence was thick around my ears and squeezed its way in.
Occasionally, I dream that Annie and I have bought a house in the Midwest because prices are good. I try to be happy, but we are always either settling in southern Ohio in my first hometown, or in southern Indiana in hers.
My mother grew up in NYS, and that's where I went when I was eighteen. There are scads of my relatives there, few of whom I've ever met. If your name is Luce, we are cousins descended from Henry Luce of Martha's Vineyard - the first Luce in the U.S. There are lots of other ways for us to be cousins, but that's the easiest. I don't have any money, so there's no reason you'd want to acknowledge kinship.
I didn't grow up with holiday traditions. I've shared satisfying holidays with friends and with Annie's family, but this is the first time EVER that I am going to spend Thanksgiving with my relatives in a traditional style. Woohoo! Some of us are ultra-liberal, some of us are conservative, and a couple of us are libertarian. Some are Mormon, some atheist, some agnostic, and some are New Age-y. Some don't believe in Western medicine, and some believe in nothing else. I don't see how anything can go wrong.
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We went shopping for a book suitable for a little girl who has just started reading. [We had to drive an hour to a town with a bookstore.] We browsed a Disney Princess book, and asked the clerk for something where women don't need to be rescued. She directed us to a series written by Jamie Lee Curtis; we chose Today I Feel Silly: and Other Moods That Make My Day. It made us LOL! Good call, Books-a-Million clerk!
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Still searching for butt rests. Took them out for test-rests today.
