My New Summer Home

Well, I am now safely ensconced in my sister’s house in Maryland – my new U.S. address and home in the summertime. I still have a few boxes of stuff in the basement of my old apartment, which I will retrieve before September, but they mainly contain paperwork and photographs.

About half the space of my car was taken up with photograph albums, about 40 years worth of photographs from before the digital age. Now all those photographs would take up small, thin CD’s, but I wonder if in the future, there will be newer forms of communication onto which these CD images must be transferred. We would be hard-pressed now to find a machine that could play an 8-track tape, though I still believe cassette players and phonographs are still available. I can’t wait to see what the next 40 years will bring, though with each new invention, it will be obsolete by the time I master it.

I am now in a nice suburban-type community, with brick houses that have wide front-yard and backyard green, grassy lawns.  I took a walk this morning, both to break in my new hiking boots and to explore the lay of the land. Sure enough, my lack of a sense of direction immediately came into play. I turned right on the main road instead of left, so instead of finding the light-rail station, I was going in the opposite direction. I truly believe that IF the Earth were truly flat, and IF I had been a ship’s captain before the time of Columbus, I would NEVER have found the end of the Earth and my crew would have been safe from that awful fate.

Mind you, I had Google Maps in my hand while I was making this mistake. I finally stopped and asked another pedestrian where the station was after I had been walking about 40 minutes. This man had what seemed to be an Australian accent, said he had only been here a few months, but indicated that the station was “miles” in the other direction.

However, my walk was not a total loss. I came upon a Barnes and Noble store, several banks, a CVS and a Latino market, where, perhaps, I can buy chayotes and purple tomatillos if I am lucky. Maybe I will even be able to practice my Spanish.

And while we do not have a jardín with a fountain, I did come upon a small park with a statue dedicated to Olympians and Paralympians. There is a statue of a boy and girl holding a globe, tables and chairs and small concrete pillars with plaques inscribed with the names of Olympic and Paralympic athletes, mostly for those who earned medals for swimming.

Either later this evening or tomorrow I will go out again, this time making sure I turn left so that I can eventually find the light-rail station. It was about 76 degrees Fahrenheit when I returned at 9am after walking for 90 minutes, and I was dripping with sweat from the humidity, so I’m not sure when I will go out again.  So – please enjoy the pictures and have a good weekend!