As you probably could gather from the pictures if you were watching, we’ve been all over New England in the last week or so; the rental car receipt said I drove 841 miles. I say “I” because I did, in fact, do the driving, since it was cheaper to add one driver than two. That is a risky proposition because I certainly know how to drive, and did a lot of it in college (when I commuted every day from my parents’ home in the sticks to the smallish city of Troy), but I almost never drive anymore: we don’t own a car, and I rarely have reason to get behind the wheel.
It went startlingly well, given that I was driving out of New York and into rural New Hampshire (about six hours), then down from there and into Boston (three hours with the traffic), then out of Boston and to the suburbs, down to Providence, back to the suburbs, out to the North Shore, back to the suburbs, and finally from the suburbs along the coastline and back through the Bronx and into Manhattan. Have now driven on basically all the terrain New England has to offer.
But it was a good trip. I finished two books (Jess Walter’s absolutely marvelous Beautiful Ruins and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, both of which delighted me because they’re ENTIRELY MADE UP, or at least mostly made up, and I’ve been immersed in nonfiction all year for MFA coursework, and am about to plunge back in), saw new places, ate a lot of good food, saw friends and family, and basically just relaxed a bit. I love New England and my family roots are in Boston, so I always feel as if I’m coming home: the green, the blue, the skies that crest above the trees and the clouds. Also the lakes and shorelines.
And the piles of seafood, the fried shrimp, the crab on top of your gazpacho, the lobster rolls, oh, the lobster rolls.
(And the mosquitoes.)
Home for a week, then off to Los Angeles for a few days. (And now, for something completely different … )
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