AH CHAUTAUQUA, THE COMFORT OF HOME

7:14

7:22

It's 7:15, warmer than Kansas City, a toasty 37º and the morning sky, as you can see, is spectacular, a view we both miss when we are on the road.  I have rarely seen the lake so calm, waveless; it makes me want to get out my kayak and cut lines on its smooth surface.  Maybe later.

And I know, I have posted this quotation a couple of times before but it's so apt after a trip, and it captures our emotions when returning back to the lake:

More than half the pleasure of going is in the return, as any traveler knows.  To go, to see the far place, the place beyond the horizon, is exciting; but to return is satisfying as few other things can ever be.  To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.
Few of us are that kind of traveler who can be at home forever away from home.  The new, the strange and the different have their lure, but one needs a place to call his own.  One needs to belong somewhere, to feel the roots, however tenuous, of identity with place.  Home, we call it, whether it be a room or a house or an apartment, a farm or a plot of grass or a well-known street or park.  Home, where one can feel and touch and see and find comfort in familiar things.  The place where one belongs.
Man, being man and an ambulatory creature with a degree of restlessness in his blood, must be up and gone from time to time.  He must go, if only to assure himself that the horizon has no boundary.  He must move from here to yonder, if only to know that he is neither slave nor prisoner.  What are hills for, if not to have a father side?  And what is the purpose of that distant rim of sky if not to lure a man beyond his own small orbit?  But once one has gone, one must come back.
And that is the final satisfaction of a trip, whether it is a vacation or just a journey -- the return itself.  The homecoming.  The trip back, and the home at the end.  To go is good, but to come back is best.

Our drive yesterday seemed endless, always like this on the last leg of a  trip.  We didn't leave Oxford until after 10:00, took the wrong road to Columbus, getting on #71 fifty miles south of the city, perhaps longer in miles, shorter in time.  Weather was no problem, in fact, I can hardly remember it, as it was so non descript except for the increasing snow on the ground as we got closer to PA, then NY, the heaviest in Chautauqua though it's melting fast with this warm weather.  Our stay with Joe and Mary Lou Barry was the highlight of our trip home; it's always fun to get together with friends from the past, some you have not seen in years and find out you have so much in common.  We did not reconnect with our friends from Ohio University until seven or eight years ago because I was so wrapped up in my teaching and coaching.  But these developing relationships since our retirement have been enriching and enjoyable, demanding little effort...just stopping by and sharing a bed or meal for a day or two.

We arrived home about 4:30, a little over six hours from Oxford.  It's always scary to come back to our house after a snow storm, worried something went wrong with our heating or water but all's well, enshallah.  When we got out of our car, the sky was gray, the lake motionless, hauntingly so, as fall colors are gone, the winter grays have taken over.  We unpacked quickly,  a task we both dislike, but within a half hour, we were settled in, relaxing on our couch, listening to NPR as the lake slowly disappeared into darkness.

Fishing in December Dusk

An easy dinner, home fries and eggs, and we settled in our TV room, to catch up on some of the series we have saved from the past two weeks.  We ended up watching The Good Wife, increasingly silly and disappointing so we turned to Stewart and Colbert, always a laugh.  We went to bed early... nothing like our lumpy King Size bed after ten days of a Queen.  Home!