Mmmmmmm, I’m going back to Massachusetts, something’s telling me I must go home…..

And that is where I spent last week with my mother and father, and the boyfriend, AKA the best sport that ever was.  We had lots of plans:  Boston, a Red Sox game, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (that plan was mine, I’ll admit), but ultimately we just wanted to spend time with the elder Paces.  Here are some of the highlights:

The Springfield Armory museum (big innovative gun factory in its day) and home of STCC, my AD in nursing alma mater.  Quite interesting, and we had a nice walk around campus, now bustling and updated, but the quadrangle is still there, lined with oaks and maples, dotted with dogwoods and even redbud trees.

Another day, we went to the history and art museum, featuring an enormous collection of Indian motorcycle memorabilia. Amazing.  Ben would have LOVED it.  Also an assortment of really fancy old motorcars, made by Rolls Royce, Pierce Arrow, and the like.  Indian made a prototype automobile, and it was on display.  Herb and Shirley joined us for that, and a stroll past the Dr. Seuss memorial, a cluster of brass sculptures of Horton, Thing One and Thing Two, Theodore himself sitting at his desk, and the Cat in the Hat.  Dr. S. was from Springfield, and established the city’s park (Forest Park) way back when.  I have lots of memories of the park, but did not visit this time.

We helped with some yardwork:  I turned over flower beds, and Doug cleaned out the eave troughs, known here in the South as gutters.  The weather was utterly perfect the whole week, cool and sunny and breezy.  Perfect.  And yes, at eighty-nine, my dad will still set out a bed of impatiens and other annuals to brighten the yard.  My mother can out-shop me any day, too.  They are both amazing.

Doug and my dad played a game of golf, and Doug and I played a round of miniature golf.  I got a hole in one!  Psyched!  I’m a golfer now, boy.  I’m sure I’ll be reminded that it was off a mulligan, but whatever.  It went in with one shot.  Afterwards, we walked the lovely 9-hole Longhi golf course in my hometown of Southwick, and my golf enthusiasm was pretty dampened by the daunting hills and sheer length of the holes.  Could imagine needing dozens of shots to even get to the green.

My cousin Danny, fifteen years ago, bought an old theater and did the renovations, and has been putting on plays ever since.  The Odd Couple was a perfect play for us, if you know what I mean.  We really enjoyed it!  and it was great to see Dan, who just became a proud grandfather.  He’s a playwright, too, and they’ll put on one of his works next season.  Proud of that, too.

The last day we were there, we trekked to Rhode Island to the beach, and had lunch there, walked around the little town of Point Judith.  We watched the Block Island Ferry come in.  Breathed ocean air.  Visited a state park organized around a kettle pond.  This from Wikipedia:  Kettles are fluvioglacial landforms occurring as the result of blocks of ice calving from the front of a receding glacier and becoming partially to wholly buried by glacial outwash. Glacial outwash is generated when streams of meltwater flow away from the glacier and deposit sediment to form broad outwash plains called sandurs. When the ice blocks melt, kettle holes are left in the sandur.

The photo is of a brook running through a nature preserve on Mort Vining Road, that Doug and I both walked, just at different times.  I was untroubled by the gnats and skeeters, but they ate him UP.  I took him to the Granville Gorge, too, a rocky stream and place of beauty, not to be missed.

Talk about the life in Massachusetts,
Speak about the people I have seen,
And the lights all went down in Massachusetts
And Massachusetts is one place I have seen.   (thanks, Bee Gees)

Back to job-hunting.

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