Four In One: Towering Trees

A perfect home for my dear friend. 

Once upon a time, I was a little girl growing up in Michigan lake country. All around the little cluster of homes that was my neighborhood, lay a friendly collection of woodlands. My friend Marilyn, who was three years older and ever so much wiser, and I spent countless hours of our early childhood playing in those woods. Oh, we built horse jumps and cleared a little homes beneath the sheltering arms of soaring oaks and hickories where we reenacted the homesteading adventures of the Little House books. On other days, we were the Boxcar Chikdren children, each of us having to play dual roles to cover all four characters among the two of us. (She was Henry and Jessie; I played Violet and Benny.) We picked pretend wild cucumbers and stored them away as pickles, and ate the real tiny, wild strawberries that grew on the hillside behind my house, warm in the morning sun. We investigated a rather large hole up that same hill, dug by a pair of local teenage boys in their best attempt to excavate a foundation for the home they were itching to build but apparently abandoned. We promptly renamed it the Bear Pit.  Although we were never too far from home, our mothers gave us tremendous freedom to play out in the woods for hours on end, and the effect was magical. There’s no doubt that these hours spent playing, imagining, and exploring among the towering trees are at the heart of who I am today.

Then Marilyn and her family moved away. At first, they settled  early, not much more than 10 miles away and our families were able to visit now and then. 

But a few years later, they made a much bigger leap to upstate New York, where they stayed permanently. My friendship with Marilyn faded into memory and I was left to explore the woods on my own.

Fast forward to August 2017. My husband, my dog and my youngest daughter and I had just taken a trip to Wyoming to view a dazzling solar eclipse and I returned home with stars in my eyes. And what  should I find in my mailbox but a letter from my long lost friend Marilyn. A miracle every bit as grand as the eclipse. 

In the years since then, Marilyn and I have renewed our happy friendship, this time as penpals. i’ve dreamed many times in these last few years of reconnecting in person, but how often does one get a chance to travel from the Pacific Northwest to upstate New York? Ever the optimist, I held out hope that circumstances might somehow bring us together, but I didn’t expect any miracles.

But just when you stop expecting miracles, that’s when they begin to take shape. Last winter when I received the invitation to my niece’s wedding in the Catskills, my brain followed a hunch. A quick Google search informed me that Marilyn lived just 90 miles north of the wedding venue. Huzzah!!

So that is how it came to be that on the morning after my niece’s wedding, I found myself jumping out of our rental car, crunching across the stones of a gravel driveway, and enjoying a heartfelt hug from my long lost friend, Marilyn. 

And much to my delight, Marilyn’s 200 year old farmhouse as well as her barns, fields, and woodland ponds did much to reassure me that Marilyn is still very much a woman of the woods. As she led me here and there about her property, showing me where the ducks nest and the deer graze, which shrubs are thriving and where the pond needs shoring up, I felt as though our friendship has been perfectly preserved over the years. Our shared passion for playing, imagining, and exploring in the woods is very much alive and well, and as my old friend Marilyn led me around her groves and stands of towering trees, my heart felt as if I had finally come home. 

Four In One: Anchors And Adventures

 

Dear Emily and Demetrio,

At your wedding, as is often the case in a postmodern ceremony, you chose to share words about your understanding of what marriage means, how you expect it will change you, challenge you, grow you.

And what you said, as I can best paraphrase, is this.

Life is about anchors and adventures. In order to boldly sail off into life's unknowns and embrace all the beautiful chaos that life has to offer, it's important too to have a place of safety and security to which one can retreat when the world becomes a bit too much to bear. And by uniting your lives in marriage, you both believe that you will make a great team that builds up both sides of your lives together.

Anchors and adventures.

And as I close in on thirty-nine years of my own married life, I'd say that's just about right. 

Now, life can be full of surprises, and no one ever stands at the altar with a clear picture of how their new marriage will unfold. When I got married all those years ago, though I didn't express them in the same words, I had similar ideas about anchors and adventures with my new husband and not surprisingly, I got some surprises along the way. It seems that my husband turned out to be more about the anchors, and I'm heavily into adventures. But that's worked out fine. Even though we don't always line up in the ways I thought we might, we still make a great team that builds up both sides of our lives together. 

Anchors and adventures.

So sail off, my loves! Celebrate your new life together by continuing to build a home of safety and security in each other's hearts, and also by launching off into the crazy cross-continental move of your most daring dreams. There's nothing on God's green earth that you can't do together, and there's no end to the sweet and tender care you can offer to one another. 

Anchors and adventures. 

I can't wait to watch your new life together unfold. 

With much love, 

     Aunt Diane

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All photos by Jean Kallina Photography taken at Full Moon Resort, Big Indian, New York

Four In One: Full Moon Resort

 When is a vacation not a vacation? Uh, when it's four vacations in one.

Yes, my husband and I flew east in early May to spend some time with our number two daughter in Columbus, Ohio. And that was fun. We ran errands together, helped her with some odd jobs around her home, and kept up our WFH responsibilities as well. I cooked a handful of her favorite meals and we also indulged in the best local takeaways. In the evenings, between baseball games and the Kraken playoffs, we found common streaming ground, which is no mean feat: The Last Thing He Told Me, Ted Lasso, and my personal favorite, Transatlantic. All in all, it was a solid, productive and entertaining week.

Yet that was just the tip of our vacation iceberg. Wanna hear the rest?

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Saturday morning, bright and early.

Swing by the Starbucks for the caffeine crew.

And settle back into your seat because we are road-tripping to a wedding in upstate New York.

Yep, one of my nieces is tying the proverbial knot at a cozy resort in the Catskills. That gives us 8.5 hours of driving up to the northeast corner of Ohio, and across the lovely rolling green hills of Pennsylvania where we saw a literal team of horses pulling a plow across a field - Amish country! By 6 p.m. we pulled into a train station in Dover, New Jersey, where my first-born, who had flown from Seattle to JFK the day before and stayed overnight with a friend in Brooklyn, hopped off the coach and into our car. We stayed the night nearby and next day took the scenic route to our first destination.

Full Moon Resort. 

You know, I'd not spent any time Googling the resort so I had no any preconceived images in my head, other than the epic jewel that is Mountain Lake Lodge where Dirty Dancing was filmed. Now that resort is technically in Virginia, even though the story line insists Baby and Johnny danced their hearts out at the fictional Kellerman Lodge in the Catskills, so that's where I got my imagery. Anyway, it was great fun because my mom loved Dirty Dancing - and Patrick Swayze in general - so I felt her presence near found myself smiling at the unlikely connection. 

The Sunday ceremony was held down at the riverside, the gurgling stream and tender spring greenery made pure poetry, and the wedding came off without a single hitch. And though I took no photos during the evening shindig, I captured a hint of the resort's beauty the next day.

^ As I ran down the slate slabs that form a walkway to the Night Sky Cottage and found an old gate leg wooden table with chairs on the well-shaded front porch, I knew we had chosen our lodgings well. We pulled our cooler from the car and sat right down for a lovely lunch of salami, cheese, crackers and fruit. 

^ Esopus Creek runs along the western edge of the resort property; the other side is a forest preserve with nothing but tender young deciduous trees. A tributary of the Hudson River, this happy stream's name is a Dutch word meaning "brook" or "small river" as well as a local native tribe. She's very sweet.

^ To the east, another forest preserve covers what the Eastern folk refer to as a mountainside. They are so cute about their tiny little hills, and we PNWers must never poke fun at their monumental illusions. 

Here we are in The Barn, enjoying a simple but satisfying farewell breakfast. I confess to skimming 90% of the blackberries off the very large serving bowl of fruit salad, and I have zero remorse. Along with the little link sausages and the white paper lanterns, they were my favorite part of the meal. 

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And now we're off again! You'll never guess where we are heading next...