Oak Park All Day

I figured out that I really don't have time to try to sit in all the chairs at Paul and Wendy's house when I started to count them all.  There are two full dining tables plus several different rooms with couches and coffee tables or game tables or a big TV.  Including all the seating outside in the garden and the various chairs at desks, there are over 90 different places sit down in this abode. And any of them would be in a space that is comfortable and aesthetically pleasing.  They live in a neighborhood that is full of Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced houses, plus the house that he actually lived in is just down the block. This house pre-dated those houses, built in about 1880 with lots of subsequent additions. The wood floors are unlike any other, really thin pieces of hardwood, nailed from the top. There is enough wood in this house to build a sturdy ship. 

Anyway, it is a lovely place to visit and if you wake up early enough, you can have whole rooms to yourself to sit and read or write and drink a hot yucky. Paul gets up early too, and he is on a pinto bean kick (has a cabinet filled with carefully labeled bottles of dry beans worthy of a Southwestern cooking show) so he made me his current favorite breakfast: bean stew with a poached egg and avocado on top. Not Jon's sort of breakfast, so he didn't feel left out when he got up.

We went to see Linda and Jon at the other end of Oak Park -- they live in a house that is much more like ours in terms of space and furnishings but their house is also influenced by the FLW design features of the area, and much more historic than ours, again with lots of wood trim and hardwood floors. Jon is an artist so the house is full of his paintings. They have three kids who are just about exactly the same age as ours, one boy and two girls, raised amidst a pile of cousins, Jewish, and the son has three children.  So many parallels except no farm -- an artist's life instead. We could talk to them for days. Linda worked on the farm during our Oberlin years and we have known each other ever since. Jon spent seven years of his wandering youth in Israel, serving in the IDF and the Reserves, so he is still connected to lots of friends in Israel. His kibbutz was attacked on October 7. Anyway, we sat around the table having delicious tomato soup and pumpkin bread for hours, sharing stories.

Then it was time to go to our next appointment -- we went to a tea shop to meet up with a high school friend of mine. As I expected, she had a lot of interesting news to share. She has been an aspiring filmmaker all her life, and she recently finished a feature film after going back to grad school at 50 so she could learn how to do that. Now her time is devoted to figuring out how to get this film distributed. You can find it on Amazon. It's called Puppy Love. There is another movie by that name but this one is about her dogs and produced for almost no money. Her next project is not a documentary, it will be a "narrative script" or something like that. It is about a woman who became famous in the early 1900s for a performance she invented that involved lots of swirling silk and long bamboo poles and the first electric lights. She influenced Isadora Duncan and she was good friends with Marie Curie. Her experiment with painting radium on her silk -- against strong advice from Marie -- failed when it burned up. Her name was Loie Fuller. When that film gets made, I will tell everyone.

Back to Paul and Wendy's for dinner. Their house is always populated by various young people, mostly connected to their youngest child, but this time including some students on vacation from college. As it happened, none of their own children were there for dinner but we had a nice time with other people's kids.  Paul has had to learn to pay close attention to using pronouns correctly, as have we all.

Storm, Wendy, Paul

As is so often the case on these trips, we have known each of these friends since before we all had kids, even since before we were married.  We are all in a good place, physically and mentally, and it is so interesting to think about what comes next. Some of us don't have any parents anymore and some of us are retired. All of us have had good lives with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. And we are definitely traveling in a bubble when it comes to political perspectives.

The next morning we got in the car at 8 AM and drove all day long.  It started snowing at about 2:00 and after that it was a lot less relaxing. Before that, we could look out the window and admire the expanse of cornfields, black soil, endless parade of farm buildings. We are still taking the smaller roads and avoiding tolls, so the trip from Chicago to Manhattan, Kansas was longer than it might have been. We got to Paul's house by 7 PM. In the very last miles, we encountered some difficulties with shifting into second gear. This may make the next leg of the trip less predictable. Up until then, we were not thinking about the car at all. It was doing its job without any need of attention.

It is still dark out at 7 AM on Tuesday so I haven't seen the view out of these giant windows yet, but there is a big lake out there and it snowed all night. Or it was supposed to, but I can't see anything yet.