Mixed Moss

Tomorrow my mother and I are going to drive to Oshkosh, Wisconsin (yes, Oshkosh, as in the overalls– there’s even a factory outlet store) to visit my Dad. He and my Mom are in the process of moving there. He’s got a new job up there and Mom is just waiting to get the house ready to sell before joining him there.

I can’t wait. I have a few memories of driving through Wisconsin on the way to visit family when I was a kid, and it’s beautiful. All water parks aside, it’s still a great place to go. Rolling green hills dotted with cows, red barns, hardwood forests changing with the seasons. Cheese and maple sugar. And the lakes. If Winnebago and all the little lakes about aren’t enough for you, there’s plenty of Lake Michigan to go around. And all the names sound either Native American or French– rather like Canada.

This is the land of my family: Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, Minnesota…though I was born in New York and raised in Cincinnati, part of me will always call the North my home. How do you know you’re a Northerner? You call the couch a davenport. At an extremely young age you know intuitively how to pronounce “Eau Claire” and “Saint Croix.” Winnebago is more than a large family vacation vehicle. You eat cheese curds (they sqeak!). You can pick out a Canadian accent, a Wisconsin accent, and a Minnesotan accent. A loon doesn’t belong in the looney bin– and whenever you hear the cry of one you feel homesick. They idea of driving across a frozen lake in a pick-up truck doesn’t seem ludicrous. A grill out doesn’t mean barbecue– it mean brats and beer. Venison and moose aren’t really all that exotic menu items. You know what a bohunk is and the phrase could be applied to you– but nobody would ever try it more than once. Yes, in a way I am going home.
But the most important thing about all this? I’m getting out of Cincinnati. Even if it’s only for not quite a week. There is very little that refreshes me so much as seeing someplace new; very little that helps me connect to God so well as seeing all the marvelously diverse places and things and people and cultures he has created. In getting to know a new place and new culture, I feel that I am getting to know God a little bit better. And what a quirky God he is!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.