On Their Way

The stories from Christmas are bumping around in my head as I pick up pine needles from places I didn’t even know existed in our home.  I’m not sure when I’ll get them all out – the stories or the needles.  I like to let stuff simmer for a bit so it might not be until a summer day in July that I find a Christmas tree needle, try and get a whiff of December 2011, and sit down to write about Hadley’s great aunt letting her drive a golf cart around her front yard.  Or Harper talking about the “Girls’ Night Out” her Aunt Mallory took her on to get a Build-A-Bear named Blueberry (can you guess the color?).  Or sitting on top of the John Hancock and being a part of the skyline while it turns from orange dusk to black with flecks of glittery twinkle lights.  Those might be stories for another time.

Today, though, I think I’ll post these blurry pictures of Hadley walking the streets of Chicago keeping up with the “el” as it rushes past her.  We’d just come from Intelligentsia Coffee, where I’d had the best cup of coffee of 2011, and perhaps of my life (Shani, one day we will do a Best Cuppa Coffee Tour.  We’ll do Mad Cap. We’ll do Rowsters.  We’ll hit Intelligentsia.  We can get t-shirts and everything.).  So I might’ve been in a particularly good mood from the dirty brown, but I think it was more the joy I had from seeing Hadley live it up on the streets of Chicago.

It is no small thing when someone you adore loves a place you love.

“That’s my middle-west – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth….” from The Great Gatsby