Love at first sight

As you read this, I will have returned (and recovered?) from one wild weekend.

 

I am currently in Illinois, specifically the far north suburbs of the Chicago area. I have some connections here because, decades back when I was a college student at Winona State, a good friend informed me she was traveling home for a few days and was going to have some wisdom teeth pulled. She wondered whether I would come along and be available as a back-up driver for the return journey, just in case she didn’t feel well.

 

We arrived at the house owned by her fiancée and, apparently wanting some alone time, she called up her brother and proclaimed, “I’ve got a woman here who is as tall as you are.”

 

Her brother—John Bently—apparently had no other plans that evening and complied with her request to come by and pick me up. He says he decided that evening I was the woman he wanted to marry.

 

In the forty-some years since, I have come and gone to this area often for all the reasons family members travel to be together. In all that time, I have never once regretted that my husband and I decided to plant our roots in rural Minnesota rather than here. Naturally, it’s a case of strengths and weaknesses; neither place is perfect and neither is unbearable.

 

For instance, I’m here now because I love to ride rollercoasters, and Six Flags Great America has some doozies. I’m also here because my granddaughter likes to ride rollercoasters, so we are riding them together—one last fling before the school year begins.

 

On the other side of the coin are the traffic and the crowds. The parking lot at Six Flags must be at least a few hundred acres in size. As the day at the park went on, the lot was so full that a car actually followed my granddaughter and me back to our parked vehicle in hope of getting our parking spot.

 

I also admit that it’s only thanks to modern GPS capabilities that I feel any sense of independence on the roads down here. It’s a bad time to be uncertain of your direction of travel when eight lanes of traffic all converge at a single stoplight. And, while Minnesota certainly has its share of speedy drivers, our family joke is that drivers in suburban Illinois regard the posted limit as a speed to be exceeded within 30 seconds of touching the accelerator.

 

I heartily prefer the occasional piece of farm equipment to the speed-or-be-sped-over feel of these suburban streets.

 

But before I brag too much, let me share the observation of my suburban sister-in-law. Unbelievably to this country gal, my sister-in-law is intimidated by driving conditions out in the wide open country. The problem for her, she says, is the roads all look alike and she’s never sure where she’s at. Funny, I could say the same about the suburbs, but for a whole lot of different reasons.

 

Anyway, I guess I’m lucky to have two such different and distinct places where I can be among family. It means I get to “escape” to an urban area every once in a while, then “escape” the madness and activity to go home again. Fortunately for me, the roads in between—in my case, the whole state of Wisconsin—also have many charms.