philly

city hall?

Pennsylvania turned out to be one my favourite states. I think it’s because it was full of small and sweet surprises. We got to Philly from NY just an our before the Rosenbach Museum was closing. Jake dropped me off while he looked for a place to park and I threw on a dress over my shorts and tee shirt before walking in, so as to look respectable when I asked to speak with the head librarian and basically tell her that my MA thesis supervisor, who spent several weeks a year here poring over the museum’s collection of unpublished letters and manuscripts, “sends her love.” This earned Jake and I a personal tour of the museum which, to our utmost pleasant surprise, turns out to be a beautiful 1860s townhouse once home to the Rosenbach brothers, a couple of art and literature aficionados who lined their bookshelves with things like: the original Ulysses manuscript in Joyce’s slanted scribble, Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, hundreds of Lewis Carroll’s letters (they sold the original Alice in Wonderland to the British Museum), original drafts of Don Quixote, Dracula, Where the Wild Things Are, and most importantly to me, Marianne Moore’s living room in it’s entirety. The whole place was just beautiful. It was a treat just to see the inside one of those townhouses let alone see Moore’s toys and trinkets and remember them in her poems.

philly has the most murals of any u.s. city

Then we get a message from Lafleur about how she’d feed us burgers and beers if we came to her ma’s house just outside of the city in Media. We tried to get there as quick as we could, but googlemaps sent us the extremely long way (as it likes to do), through the “bad neighbourhoods” where people seemed to be pretty into the idea of hanging out on the sidewalk in tight groups. Nevertheless, we got there just in time for a delicious bowl of chicken soup (with peas and carrots from the garden and chicken from the Amish farm down the road), acorn squash and maple syrup (tapped from the maple trees in the back yard!) and to be convinced that we needed to stay an extra day in PA. Lafleur’s ma Hazel has the best garden this side of the atlantic and she loved Jake’s music and plus, her home was sort of in the woods and we were happy to be there.

our guide on the ever elusive red trail at tyler's arboretum

We went on a long walk through a nearby arboretum and got lost without knowing it more than once, grazed all day long on berries like bears, chowed down on homemade burgers, and went in search of the neighbour’s life sized dinosaur collection (he made the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park). Nobody was there except the gardeners, so we had a quick look around and when we didn’t see anything, theorised that the dinosaurs must have been moved for the summer and even thought we saw the patches on the grass where they once were . (We’ve since been notified that we were at the wrong neighbour’s house!). So we went and played scrabble instead.

Turns out there was an open mic happening at the local coffee shop so Jake signed up for the last slot and we got to catch some interesting folks. One woman propped her doll, who looked and was dressed exactly like her, up on an arm chair to watch the show. A lot of other characters were kind of indescribable and interpretative and gave us the giggles.

yum!

have you ever seen a purple pepper? all in an afternoon's harvest

catching up

lafleur takes nice pictures

Miraculously, it was also in PA that we FINALLY got our boombox hookup working in the car! It was amazing (and very short lived, stay tuned). We hadn’t had any music on the road for over two months! and however many thousands of miles, so our drive to Chicago that day just flew by.