Dear future husband (whoever you are):
I promise never to make you pose with your hands in a heart shape over my pregnant belly.
Love, Lori.
If road trips are fun, spur-of-the-moment road trips with friends are even more fun. That’s why I’m glad my buddy Michelle agreed to come along with me this weekend on a whirlwind trip to Washington D.C.
I had not visited the Nation’s Capital since my fifth grade patrol trip and Michelle hadn’t been at all.
It’s about a seven-hour drive from my home in Charleston, W.Va. We left Sunday afternoon and stayed the night with my aunt in Canaan Valley, W.Va., which is on the route and about four hours away from the city.
Here are a few takeaways:
“Love is buildings set on fire,” – arsonists.
When I die my epitaph will read, “Here lies Lori, a writer. She never finished that novel but she used the prettiest pens and the cutest journals.”
Last week I went on vacation with my family.
I, my sister, brother-in-law, two young nieces, mom and dad all stayed in a beach house a block away from the Atlantic Ocean in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
As expected any time a family is in close quarters for an entire week together, hilarity ensued.
We stayed just down the road from Kill Devil Hills, where Orville and Wilbur Wright took the first flight more than a hundred years ago.
The day we visited the Wright Bros. monument, I saw a couple do a strange thing.
We had walked the hill to the top where a massive concrete monument protruded from the ground, marking the spot where the first plane flew. (By the way, why are all the monuments in this country shaped like penises?)
A man there had started to walk away from (who I presume was) his wife. He got maybe 20 feet away and she was still sitting, probably resting from the hike to the top. He turned, looked at her and sort of clicked his tongue. She came to him like he had whistled to a dog. Not a word passed between them. I recounted this story to someone who suggested that maybe the man had a speech problem and could only communicate this way. Perhaps, but I saw no evidence of that.
It was so strange that I told the story to my family. In a rare but misguided attempt at multicultural understanding, my dad (wrongly) assumed I was speaking about one of the few Indian couples that were on the hill with us.
“Well, that’s probably just their custom,” he surmised.
“Dad, it was an American couple,” I said.
He then spent the rest of the day clicking his tongue at us. No one felt compelled to follow him, though.