Road Trip #1

So the air conditioning went out on Thursday night, and of course it did, because it's muggy and August and therefore completely unbearable here in the DC area. There's a good reason foreign governments have always considered DC a tropical posting for their diplomats. It just plain sucks to be here in August.

Naturally the a/c went out, and even better! The part necessary won't be available until tomorrow.

We've been sweating it out since then, which really means we're driving around a lot. The car at least has a/c. And so yesterday on this lark we ended up driving out to West Virginia to see my husband's family's old hunting lodge/vacation home -- and I use those terms loosely. It had a roof and four walls and a semi-operational bathroom and that's it. Not even potable water. But after 18 years of marriage, I had never actually seen the place. So why the hell not, on a day when it's too hot to stay home and too miserable to go anywhere outside? So we went. He hadn't been there in 25 years.

Like most things 25 years later, it was completely different. For one thing, it was burnt out. From the looks of things, a kitchen fire or a kerosene heater fire had taken out the entire backside and interior of the little house. It was abandoned, sitting forlorn and alone on its little hill. It was originally built in the 1920's -- we think -- a little four-square stuck on a shaved-off top of a hill, with a barn and fields on the other side of the little dirt road (now barely paved). All of that is overgrown. My husband says the barn collapsed while he was still being dragged up there on weekends, but what is now forest was once fields and ponds where he dug up the fossils that now litter our display shelves for them. Not everything that happened up there was boring and mildly threatening to a child.

The family friend who shot the furnace was, of course, but I digress.

The girls loved seeing this little piece of their father's history, so that they could get just that much of him into perspective. They peppered him with questions and made him tell stories until he was cross-eyed. It made me remember that we don't experience our parents as people until long after they have need of it, and that this is one of the cruel realities of parenting. You're everything to them, but you are also nothing. And it's necessary, so that they can become themselves unencumbered.

We're taking Grandma out to dinner today.