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Aaahhh, nothing like familiar surroundings after a few days away. On the road to 'wild and wonderful' West Virginia the past few days, visiting our 'adoptive' Mammaw and Pappaw York, my brother-in-law Terry's family. My own wyfe and kids have made the trip quite a few times over the years, hence the familiar 'mammaw and pappaw', but I always was occupied making a living so I was the new kid in town this trip. Said town of St. Albans, way down the southeast corner of the state, is over a coupla rivers and more mountains than you could shake a stick at. It's a seven, eight hour road trip, lotta drive-drive-drivin'... Plenty of rocks and rills, deer and wild turkey, valley vistas and little mountainside towns to gawk at along the way, quite scenic. A great little roadside orchard store called Hepburn's is close to the end of the journey, always a stopover on the way. They offer fresh fruit in season and plenty of little souvenir doodads, craft goods and stuff like that but the real draw for travelers is an assortment of incredibly delectable homemade fruit pies; we stocked up for the stay with pumpkin, blueberry, pecan* and, last but certainly not least, one called 'fruits of the forest', a conglomeration of apples, strawberries, rhubarb and a couple other fruity-berry chunks thrown in for good measure. Good stuff. Naturally, like any vacation, we made a point of eating out every day- including the usual turkey and all the fixins at the Charleston Marriott on Thursday and one of Terry's favorite hometown eateries, Captain D's, a down-home version of Long John Silver's featuring yummy fried fish, hushpuppies and fries -and lounging determinedly at the hotel every night. I got chided for watching the usual three channels we have at home when the cable in the rooms offered nearly a hundred channels. All those channels and nothing on, y'know. The kids used the pool a coupla times and wound up with burning, stinging eyes the last time from the high concentration of chlorine, ouch! Visited one local shopping plaza which featured a cool used music shoppe and a great hobby/crafts store where I found some thin brass rods to use in one of my doll projects(more about that later on my toymaking website news column). The town has a mess of pawn shops, I like to check 'em out for the guitars, there must be six or seven shops but only made it around to two of themthis trip. We looked at some of their rifles too; my son, the hunter, is looking for a bolt action .22 because Pennsylvania forbids hunting with semi-automatic arms like the rifle he currently owns. Anyway, we told the counter guy at the first shop that and asked, 'Can you hunt with semi-automatics here?' 'Oh, yeah,' he answers, 'This is West Virginia, you can shoot just about anything with anything here.' Pretty funny, causing an aside to my wyfe in my best hillpeople accent, 'We jes' step off the porch and start shootin' at whatever runs by, ma'am!' Handful of antique/collectible shops too but with the short stay and a full schedule of visitation with Pappaw at the family residence- spent a good deal of time chatting about his family of nine sisters and three brothers -bringing Mammaw to and from the nursing home and visiting older brother Roy and his wife Louise** right down the road in Hurricane- 'HER-a-kin' in the local parlance - there was no time to make the rounds of those. The kids took turns staying overnight with Pappaw, watching cartoons turned up too loud until all hours, playing with their doll men in the empty lot across the street and coaxing the neighborhood stray pooch onto the porch. The poor creature apparently was turned out of doors and is neglected by it's people, he/she was awfully skittish in addition to being pretty unkempt. By the time we departed, 'Honey'- I don't know if that was her name by his 'owners' or if the kids came up with the name -was slightly less wary of approach, allowing the kids to pet her, and had a new dog box and blanket on Pappaw's porch. At least she won't be turned into a pup-sicle when the temps dip below freezing. And fer sure there are more details of the whole adventure but, as usual when I get around to updating here, it is late, late, late. It is good to be home and sleep in my own bed. Better get off to slumberland and check in again another time. Yep.

*Y'know, I love all sorts of nuts and those pecan candy logs like you used to get at, well, now I can't recall the name of those highway eateries, what was it? Anyway, you know the stuff I'm talkin' about, right? The chopped nuts are rolled around a gooey nougat center. But I only recently, within the last coupla years I mean, became acquainted with pecan pie when my cousin Suz, Susan, started making them. Ooohh, that gooey goodness with crunchy brown-sugary nuts on top is just...>mmmm-wahhh!!!<

**Louise is a self-taught painter of landscapes and still-life. I'd seen several of her paintings- Terry and Marcia's home and the beach house, for example -but we stopped into a local gallery in town where she had a dozen or so works displayed with several other local artists. Some very nice work, very inspiring. Marcia says she has a number of such venues and sells quite a few paintings. Very cool!

Flashback

Speaking of 1979, took a little drive up the country this afternoon. Right by the infamous Three Mile Island at Middletown. I used to see it across the panoramic view of the river valley as I drove to work every morning, waaaay off in the distance. But we were right alongside it today, up close those huge towers are big, baby, with steaming rolling out over the top. Makes you expect a meltdown any minute. Or a third eye to start growing from your forehead as you drive by. Okay, it's not that bad. But we did see several glowing, multi-limbed fish walking along the riverbank.

No, not really, I made that up.

But it was a flashback because I remember being sent home from school when it was ready to meltdown or explode or whatever it is out-of-control nuclear reactors do. More than a few of my schoolmates were properly frightened but most were just glad for an excuse to leave school early. I'm sure I was too- just glad to get out of school -because I'd never heard of TMI up to that point, being a country-fied rube I supposed our electricity was supplied by mules turning a water wheel somewhere further up the Pequea Creek. What did I know about reedio-activity or nuke-yeller power? Even now most of what I know about nuclear power comes from watching The Simpsons. And handling those hot glowing rods obviously hasn't hurt Homer none. Doh!

Nowadays TMI has become our family acronym for 'Too Much Information'. Somebody spills the beans or offers a too-revealing personal glimpse in mixed company, it's "Hey!!! TMI, thank you very much!" Like tonight while visiting friends, our hostess proclaims their giant cushy reclining sofa could turn anyone into a couch potato. And my daughter offers, 'Daddy has a pair of red underwear that says 'couch potato' on it." Hmmm, really? Ah, did anybody need to know that?!? Hoo boy!

Dream a little dream

So I had this dream the other night. The family and I are frolicking, yes, frolicking about a verdant hillside. There seemed to be quite a group of people about, none I could identify in my dream state but we all felt right at home, safe and sound among the trees and the breeze. Sun shining and puffy clouds. Kites flying. Squirrels hopping about. Then somebody pointed skyward and everybody looks up to see a streak of light, like a shooting star but it's broad daylight. And then there was another. And another. Soon the skies are lit with streak after streak of streaking... something. It was fascinating and not at all threatening and everybody was 'ooohing' and 'aaahhing' and quite enthralled.

Until one of the streaks appeared to stop short above our hillside location and started to drop, looming larger and larger until it was obviously crashing down right on top of where we stood! People started scrambling this way and that, screaming and running, shoving and clawing to get away from the crashing whatevers. In the confusion I was separated from the rest of the family and finally was alone in the middle of an unfamiliar forest. There was nobody around and the crashing things, I never really discerned exactly what they were, meteors, boulders, washing machines... I dunno, but at least they were no longer falling outta the sky threatening life and limb.

So I walked out of the woods and came upon a little village. Like a little Swiss hamlet nestled in the hillside. One of the first ten issues(I forget which issue exactly, maybe number five because I think the next issue included Batman and I know that was number six)of Swamp Thing by Berni Wrightson and Len Wein features such a peaceful little place. Everybody walks around smiling and greeting one another, perfectly at peace and happy all the time. A little alpine paradise. A paradise where even the misshapen creature that used to be Dr. Alec Holland is welcomed and treated with compassion and kindness despite his monstrous, moss-encrusted form. Turns out they are clockwork people built by a rotund little clockmaker as a template for a peaceful world society. And then they go berserk and everybody dies. Except the Swamp Thing, of course.

Anyway, in my dream I go into this little hillside town and it's Oktoberfest or MeisterBrauMunchenHappenin or something like that, bratwurst grilling everywhere and giant kegs of beer tapped on every corner and the tangy sweet odor of sauerkraut punctuating each breath. And the people, once again, are walking around smiling and greeting one another, perfectly at peace and happy all the time. And the oom-pah band or the polka is playing as frantically I go from person to person trying to warn them that, hey, there are huge meteors, boulders or washing machines falling from the sky and their little bubble is about to burst in a big way and would they please help me find my family!

And nobody listens. It's like they don't speak the same language. Which, of course, they don't. They smile politely and nod at me and look at each other with a shrug and offer me a beer or a brat. So after a while- and a few beers -I gave up and walked out of town and back along the mountain path the way I came...

And that's all there was to it. Is it just me or do most dreams have, like, no real resolution one way or another? No ending or imperative that finally is met and wraps everything up neatly so that everybody lives happily ever after? Or would that be the 'thud' of hitting the ground when you dream you're falling? Probably. I've never dreamed much, not to say 'never' but not much, of falling. More often of flying. I remember as a boy I dreamed of flying, and it was very real, right up and out of the park where we lived most of my boyhood years, dodging the power lines and telephone wires, up over the trees and hills, following roughly the route my school bus took every day except a hundred feet in the air. And I wasn't afraid.

I don't remember when the flying dreams became less frequent but I know when they did I often tried to instigate them by thinking 'flying thoughts' before I went to sleep at night. That didn't seem to work. Maybe I'll have to try it again, zoom, zoom, zoom!

Live from East Prospect...

...At least I theenk I am still alive! Boy, it seems I end up here late, late at night a lot. I guess it's the last thing I tend to check before signing off the brightly lit 'lectronic magick box for the night. A quiet week, lot of driving around town and messing around the house. Not that I'm getting anything done, just spending time. On the plus side I have time to think about how to go about a lot of things I didn't have time to do before. I need a sign: 'Genius At Werk'. That way when the steam starts rising from my brow anyone who happens by will know I'm not to be disturbed. Uhh, yeahhh...

Finally got some of those Beatlemania pictures back- mentioned away back -I thought there would be more but it's only a handful. Anyway, the counter guy at WalMart's photo department probably dropped his teeth when he got this order. There must have been twenty rolls of film my wyfe had saved up. I mean, some of them the kids look half their present age! Ridiculous! But there are some beach pics, dogs, kids, lotta stuff. I'll have to try and sort a few out for inclusion in thee Yahoo! family album. Yahoooo!

A walk in the park...

It's called Rocky Ridge for good reason and the walking trails are evidence of how appropriate is it's moniker. Part of the York County Parks system; my Dad used to supervise the maintenance of all the county parks, making trails, trimming trees, cutting grass, all that stuff. Anyway, the fambly took a looong hike through the woods there today, down one hill and up the other. It was sunny and temperate and altogether the kind of day you wanna be out traipsing around in the woods. We were making way too much noise to spot many birds or small creatures, one little grey bird and a single chipmunk being the exceptions. Along with the little rocks dotting the trails there were giant rocks to clamber over and in between- I mean big rocks too, you know, the kind that are stuck together, jutting from the ground at odd angles and one seemingly perched precariously on top of another so that you wonder, 'How did that rock get there anyway?!?' -and walking sticks and plenty of unidentifiable varieties of leaves to be found lying hither and yon. Pretty cool.

BTW I bought a big, hardbound Get Fuzzy comic strip treasury book yesterday and one of the strips featured a haiku by Bucky, the wacko cat who stars in the strip. So I made one up about our sojourn into the forest:

Train whistle, mournful. Ttitmouse barely bends the branch. Woodland afternoon.

Hahahaha, I'm a poet. A Japanese poet, at that. Hahahahaha. Alternately, it could go like this:

Oh... my feet kill me. Watch out for bloodsucking ticks. Put that down, 'stick boy'!