All these photos I can’t post yet! But I missed getting one of the gust of wind capturing a goodly number of perfect yellow leaves and sprinkling fall confetti shimmering over the canal, a little ahead of my brother and me as we walked along the towpath at Swain’s Lock. Gorgeous.
Bryan drove down from New Jersey yesterday to see us, and we had a delightful time visiting. He and I spent several hours again today driving around, reminiscing, pointing things out to each other and generally behaving like a couple of homesick types glad to be back for a short while.
One of the things we were remarking to each other about is how growing up in Washington is probably different from other places: you learn early on to wear a celebrity-filter-o-meter. We were chuckling over stories and memories of people we knew whose parents were names you’d often read in the paper: presidential candidates, ambassadors, you name it, but to us they were just Tom and Fabriccio (did I spell that right?) and the like.
We drove past the old homestead, and the contractor nicely allowed him the grand tour, too, like I got to do a week ago. I gave the man an inscribed copy of the book and a scarf designed specifically to celebrate the rebirth of the house and how happy Mom and Dad were to sell the place to the woman that bought it; he promised to pass them along to her for me. We drove past a couple more times in the afternoon on the slim chance the new family might stop by to check on the contractor’s progress–it would have been so cool to get to say thank you in person–and I waved hi as we passed by that last time, hoping we weren’t getting annoying by then. (I’m sure we were!)
And that’s probably that. Tomorrow we fly back west.