After picking up the family tent stakes at the end of June and moving from one city to another not very far away, I left all the corrugated cardboard behind for a lengthy road trip to Ohio, America’s Heartland, with my children and mother to visit her parents.

Four generations of the family managed successfully to spend a relatively happy week together doing both touristy things as well as boring things, spending time running around and time just hanging out on the 100-year-old swing set. (We’re not totally sure on the age but it did belong to my 86-year-old grandfather as a child and is quite sturdy.)

Having a little time just to hang out was really great, since it afforded my kids a chance to socialize with their great-grandparents in ways that sometimes surprised me, like when Council showed Grandy how her Tamagotchi works. And he really wanted to know, since all things gadget-related seem to interest him. He and my mother share a GPS obsession.

On one day, after going early to the farmers’ market, otherwise known as the Local Social Scene, there was a funeral to attend; later that afternoon my cousin and aunt attended a rollicking wedding shower.

Below my family talks with the famous Chef William at the farmers’ market after my kids had already each purchased a one-dollar treat. My grandmother loves his recipes and concocted a few of them for us at home during our stay.

Just prior to both events was a small folk concert in the park offered by a man traveling the country to talk about peace, and we were all encouraged to show up because it had been arranged by my grandparents’ church. We were given pins and peace rings and plastic bird warblers and small bubble-blowing containers.

Many people at the event happened to be dressed in black, because the funeral was for a well-loved church congregant, and they were all doing the same thing we were: supporting the concert, then heading to the funeral. Even the bubble-man folk singer acknowledged the unfortunate timing of the concert up against the funeral. When everyone left, however, I took my kids to the public pool instead, where we proceeded to lose a Tamagotchi (later found, although having been reset and thus “killed”), and where I sunburnt the backs of my legs really badly, but we did have an awesome time, and anything not-funeral was good with us.

We spent the evening visiting an open house at a local studio and shop for an artisan and bookbinder with an old-fashioned letterpress. The artisan does everything in an arts and crafts style in the manner of a few generations of men before him of the same name. I walked away with several lovely tiles they sell in their shop from a different artist in Canada. It was mesmerizing to watch the letterpress in action as letterhead was generated before our eyes. There was also jewelry for sale. My son Paolo asked how much the brooches cost. When he was told $95 he muttered, “I guess I’ll have to start saving up for that…”

That night everyone was a little emotionally drained, so naturally we all went to church the next morning, and my daughter and I had power struggles about whether she would put on the dress she brought for the occasion, and then about whether she would actually enter the church building itself. As it worked out, my aunt saved the day, and was able to persuade Council to come in for a little while to see how it was. The peace folk singer attended the church service as well, so we heard a few of the same songs as well as a few others, and there was more bubble-blowing. Council, grumpy as ever, sat far away from me, but had cheered up by the time we had to leave. Her method of rebelling before we left was to take a little walk to a stand of pine trees outside the church doors and put a bunch of the nature in her hair, and then wander around pretending to be some kind of fairy, which she knew I would find terribly annoying, and she was right.

Following this we went on one of my favorite excursions of the whole trip, a visit to the grounds of a former governor’s mansion, within walking distance of my grandparents’ house.

We visited the interesting museum on the grounds and then walked over to the large, gorgeous home for an hour-long tour, offered by a woman dressed up in period costume. She asked us not to take flash photography or touch anything. Naturally, upon hearing this, my youngest child reached out to run his hands along the baseboard, wondering if it was “real wood.”

The building was heavily air-conditioned, but otherwise I truly felt I had been transported back 200 years as we wandered through it and heard about candles made of animal fat, servants who never washed and therefore were encouraged to stay out of occupied rooms (especially when entertaining guests), a dark doorknobless closet known as “the crying room,” and various methods for staying warm or cool in the different seasons of the year.

My children peppered our tour guide with a lot of engaging questions—so many that we may have reached a point where she was eager to have us finish our tour. They remarked on everything about the house and mused on any topic, no matter how picayune, related to what it must have been like to live in the house in the early 1800s.

As the tour went on, their questions and comments became increasingly more conversational and embarrassing for their mother. Indeed, immediately upon entering the home, Paolo proclaimed loudly that the foyer smelled like a basement. It only got worse/better from there, depending on your point of view and sense of humor.

While we visited the formal dining room, we heard about how Governor Worthington had entertained the renowned Shawnee chief Tecumseh in about 1803, who stayed at the mansion for a week with his companions, and who had presented the governor with a ceremonial peace pipe in the shape of a tomahawk.

The tour guide pointed out the very cup Tecumseh had drunk from, and said that during his stay at the mansion, he and his companions opted to sleep outside under the beautiful trees. “Well, that’s good,” Paolo burst out, “because they probably didn’t smell very good anyway!”

I was so astounded by this comment and doubly embarrassed by how it probably sounded or was received by the others on the tour that I could only look at him and wonder at what he may have been thinking. The comment also seemed to leave our tour guide at an actual loss for words, seeing as how up until that point she had been trying to respond to the children’s comments and questions.

It is perfectly possible that no one in 1803 smelled very good, but that’s somehow not quite the point in the story about Tecumseh. I leave it to Paolo to think laterally and always take us by surprise.

Later that night we all went to a Chillicothe Paints minor league ball game, where dinner was ballpark fare and the pace was slow and relaxed. My children, all a bit tired perhaps, started acting up toward the uneventful end of the game, when I thought I might have to leave early with them, but they perked up when they were invited to run the bases with any other interested kids. Not wearing the proper footgear made for an amusing run for each of them.

When we went to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park last week—a huge, much-anticipated event for our family—my kids wondered aloud whether they would be invited to run the bases after the game. Sadly, I had to tell them it was probably not going to happen. In some ways the minor league ball games are more enjoyable for that kind of reason.

There was also much sewing with greatgrandma and lots of playing with old toys we’re accustomed to busting out when there are children in the house. My grandparents are great hosts and provide ceaseless stimulation with seemingly zero effort.

Thus it was that on the last night of our stay, while perusing some of the photographs from the peace folk singer over the weekend on his web site, my grandfather played the YouTube video produced from the visit (still images accompanied by John Lennon’s “Imagine”). My mother, cousin, aunt and son all showed up in the still images from that brief visit at the park. We finished watching that and my grandmother asked why the video was so stuttery. I explained that if you just let the video load a bit more before playing it, the whole thing will play more smoothly since it won’t be trying to load while you watch and sometimes surpass the loading.

My grandfather asked how you tell it to wait. By way of example I clicked on another video, this one demonstrating a recent hovercraft race on the Scioto River in Chillicothe. My grandmother had previously been telling us about how amazing these hovercraft are since they go on land and sea. I showed how, since the video begins to play automatically when you load the page, you can just click “pause” and give it a moment to load maybe one-third or halfway before playing, and how the red bar shows you how much has been loaded.

They totally followed all of this and remarked on how slow the video was loading. Their DSL connection is not the fastest but they do have a very secure wireless setup, as I discovered upon hitting not just a password protected router but also the most powerful, all-knowing firewall I think I’ll ever encounter in my life. At any rate we allowed the video to load a bit and then we listened to lively rock music and watched hovercraft racing on the Scioto together. And I thought to myself, how many people can say they’ve watched YouTube with their kids’ great-grandparents?

One of the best parts of the visit, though, was breaking in my new iPhone. I found the most frequent use for it was de-spamming my other blog as we trundled along from one place to another. Not exactly glamorous, but definitely practical.

Posted by Heather B on 6 August 2007 at 4:34 pm.