After two days in and out of DC, we spent a more leisurely morning Friday. Ostensibly, I caught up on some of my backlogged teaching work. Riiiiiiiggggghhhhttt. More accurately, we had formal school lessons for the kids and caught our breaths.
The fun part of the day started in the early afternoon as we set out from Hanover for St. Leonard, Maryland. This involved a roughly 70-mile drive due south to the western coast of Maryland that fronts the Chesapeake Bay. We had a dinner invitation from a friend that Gena and I both knew mostly 20 years ago. Nancy is a fellow blogger in addition to being an old friend. We hadn't seen her since a common friend's wedding in 1999, and I'm sure there was a certain level of uncertainty about how the evening might go. The Internet and blogs and Facebook are wonderful for artificially prolonging or reestablishing relationships that, a few short years ago, would have been considered forever lost but for the most remarkable of circumstances or divine intervention. Would spending an evening together as families prove to be as simple as posting on one another's blogs or Facebook pages?
Happily, it was a wonderful time. Their two boys were very happy to allow our children to play with their toys while they spent time making googley eyes with us. Nancy had made lasagna for dinner, we had brought wine. Before dinner our children were mesmerized first by feeding blades of grass through the wood-slat fence to the neighbor's hens; later they were mostly engaged with an impromptu whiffle-ball game.
After dinner we all walked 15 minutes to the coast. A very strong chilly wind was blowing, picking up the coarse white sand and flinging it against our legs and feet fruitlessly. We could make out the shape of the eastern shore of the bay, which happened to be Maryland as well. Alec found a shell, and after ten minutes or so of gazing across the water as the light slowly began to pull back from overhead, we turned and walked back.
It was a good time. Talk of teaching and writing - interests and jobs that Nancy and I share in common - much discussion of family and the joys of children, time to get to know her husband (also named Paul), and to discuss members of Gena's family that Nancy knew from decades earlier. Good home-cooked food and the pleasure of a glass of wine. The oddest thing about the evening was realizing that, as Nancy and Paul talked about their lives and recent goings-on, I already knew about much of it to some extent, since I follow her blog. Sort of a delayed deja-vu.
We got to see a part of the country we never would have otherwise taken the time to explore. We got our first (but hopefully not last!) glimpse of the Chesapeake Bay. And we had the chance to reconnect with a very old friend and meet her husband and children. We are blessed to have friends and family scattered around the country and world, and where we often lament how far apart we are from them, it makes those moments of reconnection that much more sparkling and beautiful when they occur.
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