Weekend.

[agent_dani]

It was a whirlwind but an enjoyable one. We arrived at home about an hour ago, having detoured through Raleigh to have dinner with my parents.

In short form: We drove to Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where we were staying. My mother-in-law came up to a restaurant there and we had dinner that evening. As a note - a sports bar/restaurant across the way from a Penn State Uni. campus on a Saturday night early in the fall semester? Not the best choice, but given the time...

Sunday we visited with her more and also with my sister-in-law and SIL's boyfriend at their house across town (it's a small town, so the distance was, perhaps, 1.5 miles.) It was a long but enjoyable night. Monday we picked-up MIL and went to a place she had been on a bus trip but wanted to visit again as she had too little time during that trip. It was Kitchen Kettle Village in Intercourse, PA (and, as I noted on other social media sites at that point, my inner twelve-year-old was dying as I attempted to be a good girl and not say anything as I'm pretty sure my MIL wouldn't have appreciated it.) We left there after dinner, around 6-7 P.M., and didn't stay long after we returned to MIL's house.

Today we drove back to North Carolina; a trip that took a little longer due to some traffic delays and sometimes heavy rain, and was a little later due to a late start. It didn't help that I was awoken at about 05:45 by a text message from my employer; a campus-wide message about severe thunderstorm and tornado watches in effect throughout the day (I understand my coworkers were huddled in the basement of the building for a time in the late morning.)

While there I came to understand in a personal way the phrase, "you can't go home again." I grew-up one county north of where we stayed, but for practical purposes, it was the region where I lived for 30-some years. And now it feels so very foreign. I'm not from there anymore and I never will be again. I don't believe it a place where I could feel comfortable, in part because I have those experiences there. I certainly didn't feel comfortable being in the slightest affectionate toward my wife while in public, e.g. a quick kiss or holding her hand.

NEPA isn't home; Durham is.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Intercourse just couldn't be a place name originating from anywhere else but 17th century America, could it? :o)

Saying that, we live not far from the village of Heart's Delight.

[agent_dani]

There are a bunch of them in that area - Blue Ball, Bird-in-hand, Virginville...

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I suspect the first two would have been the names of inns.
My favourites here have to be Queen Camel and Pease Pottage (only the Brits would name a place 'pea soup'). I also know of a Mount Nod :o)

[agent_dani]

They were names of taverns, although some maintain stories of the tavern gaining the name in particular ways. Blue Ball is probably the oddest - it was supposedly a device used to signal stagecoach drivers that passengers were waiting.

[phonemonkey.livejournal.com]

I think that you know you've truly left a place for good when you can go there to visit, have a perfectly pleasant time doing tourist things and seeing people, and then leave it behind you, and emotionally that's all that's there.

[agent_dani]

I very much agree and, in that way, am glad that it was three years before I was back. I don't know that I would have felt the same if I had been back in half that time, say.

[cafemusique.livejournal.com]

It'll be interesting to see what happens for me. I grew up in a town in Ontario. My parents moved away the summer after I finished high school. Seven years later, I moved back to that town and worked there for seven years.

And now, I've spent nearly three years in Virginia, uncertain when I'll manage to get back to that part of Ontario for the first time since my move (and marriage).