Respite

"The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking I still love that picture of us walking Just like that ol' house we thought was haunted Summer's end came faster than we wanted

Come on home Come on home No you don't have to be alone Come on home Come on home No you don't have to be alone Just come on home"

-John Prine, Summer's End

Writing with Dean the Cat in my lap, slapping at my hands and my chest whenever I quit scratching him to type this blog. He's developed a purr that's really more of a chirp when he's happy with his situation. I've heard it a lot over the last little bit, seeing as how he has barely left my lap since I arrived back in Corning yesterday.

Man, I needed this. I wrote yesterday about how exhausting the last couple weeks, the last summer . . . hell, all of 2023 have and has been. I just need to abide for a little bit before I dive back into the fray.

The flight home proved blessedly uneventful. I took off out of Asheville, flew runway heading, then was cleared direct to ELM without changing course again until I was within a few miles of the field over two hours later. The Appalachians poked out of the low clouds like a shark or a submarine breaking the surface of some white sea.

For some reason Sirius satellite radio has started working on the panel, so I dialed up the classical music station and dozed to Brahms as the Columbia droned north. These long haul flights are a respite of their own, given that for a brief stretch of time there's no email, no text, no phone.

When I arrived here midday and started looking for an Uber (P was working at Arnot), the nice young man who marshaled the plane into its parking place offered a ride to Tara. It turns out he's ex-Air Force, and trained as an avionics specialist. He's woefully underchallenged here, but this is home and he came back to be closer to family while he's raising kids. Having now raised three boys half, or a whole, continent away from their families, I see the value of that now, a tad too late.

Once back at this desk in the home office I worked a bit, but P left the hospital early after completing a complicated case. She wanted to take a drive up to Canandaigua to walk the grounds around the condo we're hoping to buy, and with cobalt blue skies on a 75 degree day I figured the trip would be consistent with my agenda of trying to escape the woes and pressures of the last few days.

So we hopped into the roadster, top up because the air was a little too chill to expose our noggins to the elements, and drove an hour up to South Bristol. The trip was every bit as spectacular as we'd hoped, with farmers' fields in late summer yellow and green splendor. The current owners of the condo were home, thwarting what I suspect was Peg's secret agenda of peering through windows, so after a few minutes of walking the common areas and trying not to look suspicious, we drove north along the shoreline to the town of Canandaigua in search of a preprandial.

Our meander took us to the Lake House on Canandaigua, a fancy hotel and marina there at the north edge of the lake. I wrote about our visit there last December, when the place was mostly deserted. This time it was active with folks taking in the lake and the sunshine on this last week of summer.

We ordered drinks and a Mexican chip and dip basket (which turned out to be supper), and enjoyed watching families and their kids hopping on and off the deck boats that pulled up from time-to-time, and groups of young folks playing cornhole. The musical background was straight out of 1978-80 or so. It could have been SoWal, but with nice people and about two-thirds less of them.

Driving home, we'd planned on pressing on to the outdoor bar and restaurant on Market Street at the Radisson to listen to our favorite local one-man cover band, Virgil Cain, but the exhaustion of the last few days began to take hold with a vengeance, and we changed our plans to crawling into bed with a movie at 8:30 and, inevitably, P fell asleep well before the halfway point. I gave myself the luxury of shutting down the tablet and lying there in the cool darkness, listening to P sibilantly snore ever so softly, and thinking I'd be hard-pressed to experience a moment better than this.

Dean's given up on forcing me to pet him, and is now curled up in my lap sleeping off last night's hijinks with Slane around the neighborhood. It's barely cracked 60 degrees out there, with a forecast of clear skies and 76. I'll work a little now, attend a Zoom hearing to get appointed as the executor of Mom's estate, and peel off to start the three day weekend when P gets home. I also need to run a few miles in there somewhere--I'm still signed up for that half-marathon, and my training regimen has collapsed under the weight of the last couple weeks. Mostly, however, I'm going to take it slow here for the next little bit, and try to recharge a little before the Labor Day weekend gives way to a challenging combination of work and starting the long process of cleaning up Wyldswood.