No place like Home

I spent part of the weekend with my parents. Next to traveling, that's my favorite thing to do. I'm so grateful that they live near enough so I can go virtually whenever I want with little effort. Within 90 minutes I can be home. And that, in fact, is what I did Saturday morning.

I took the back roads to get there, driving through some lovely farmland and the quaint town of South Berwick, home to Sarah Orne Jewett, the great quirky spinster local color writer chronicalling life in Maine. She wrote such things as...

"It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out."

"Tact is after all a kind of mind reading."

"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."

"When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am."

"Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of."

Well, I had some lovely conversation with my oldest and dearest friends. It was well worth the trip. We walked and talked and sat and talked and watched Loma Linda Church and vespers and generally had a peaceful, restful time together.

Best of all, I got to have breakfast with them in the morning. This is one of my favorite things about staying over night...lingering over a good breakfast together.