A Little Traveling Music Please!

On The Road Again, Back Then...

On the road again... where we were going when this was taken, I am now, not really sure.    I was the one taking the photo with my Kodak Instamatic. It was the newest camera with a film cartridge and a flash cube. Twelve, twenty-four or thirty six shots were all you got, so there was no wasting film.   My dad is in the drivers seat, my mom is waving, my sister is in the backseat, and I am just glad to be on the road ready for the next adventure.

 We called it Baba's House, even though my sister and I were too young to remember our Baba, (Polish for grandma,)  before she died.  It was the family farm where my mother grew up and my uncle and cousins lived. I am on the right, and my sister is on the left.  I wore my hair in ponytails for so long that the part down the back of my head was almost as permanent as the one on the top of my head.   I watched my uncle use this piece of farm equipment once during "hay-making." It attached to the back of the tractor and acted like a huge rake, scrapping the cut hay into big piles that were later turned into bails.  

Along the back edge of the photo are the huckleberry bushes which we picked and picked until the pails were full.  I remember just eating them with sugar and milk and thinking there was no better taste in the world.  

Swimming at Eagle Lake, was the best part of summer. It was really more of a pond, but one of my cousins painted a wooden sign and stuck it it the ground, so it became Eagle Lake.  Bull-frogs flopped into the still water, dragonflies skimmed along the edges of the pond,  and the distant hum of heat-bugs meant that this was the perfect summer afternoon. My mom and dad, cousin, sister and aunt cooled off in the shade of the old  cabin next to Eagle Lake, and I once again, snapped one of my precious photos.  Later, dinner would be hot dogs held in the campfire on long sticks,  my aunt's potato salad, my mom's jello and RC Cola or orange soda. The adults had Ballentine beer.  The first 'good sunburn' of the summer meant that that night, my skin would sting, but it was all worth it.  

Let the Journey Begin..again..

May 26, 2014
     Just thinking a road trip brings  me  to the backseat of my childhood car-- a 1961 Chevy Impala-- as my sister, mother and father headed for our two week vacation to Pennsylvania; no seat belts, no air conditioning, just the wind in our faces. Each year was the same, so I am not sure if it was 1968 or another summer road trip I am remembering.  I know I always felt that satisfying butterflies-in-my-stomach sensation that meant the best part of my summer was at the end of that road.
I remember how the smoke from my father's stogie swirled around inside the car and then was pulled out the open windows to mix with the odors of wet pavement, car exhausts and that gritty tin taste that will always be Manhattan to me.

New York City 1968

 It took us six hours to get from New York City to my mother's family farm in northeastern Pennsylvania.  I knew we were getting closer when the radio stations my father listened to started to get static and then finally gave over to a more local station playing country music, with commercials for stores I didn't know.  Soon the air stopped smelling like the city and instead smelled of new mown hay and wet earth.  Spending two weeks in the country meant swimming in ponds, not public swimming pools, catching fire-flies in jars, running barefooted in the fields, exploring the caves that bordered my mother's family farm, and singing songs around a campfire. Those two weeks meant everything to me. And getting there on the open road was the start of the adventure.

Baba's House in Dushore, Pennsylvania 1968

So now, the composition book I used as a vacation journal  back then, has become a blog.  I am new to this. It is certainly high tech for me.  I can't press a flower between its pages, or play a game of tic tac toe on a back page, to pass the time with my sister.  But, hopefully when I am done with this blog, I will have recorded some great memories.