Ohio

A few weeks ago the boy and I took what I'm referring to as our second honeymoon. Just us and no internet and no cell phone coverage in a cabin in the Ohio hills. We've never had even an overnight trip, just the two of us since we've been married. It was absolutely perfect.

The house frame was ancient, but totally re-done in a kind of rustic modern style. Elegant butcher block counters combined with a huge massaging showerhead with an original stone fireplace and quirky little details. Sometimes I get scared of the overly-floral bed and breakfasts out there, it's really hard to find a modern tasteful one, and this one was perfect, we couldn't have asked for more.

Matches for the grill kept in there.

There were so many porches and little outdoor spaces, I spent every minute I could reading or eating or drinking outside, just soaking up the green and clearing my mind.

We drank that champagne on a perfect rainy afternoon. I have a problem with saving things forever, and I was determined to go ahead and drink this, in an effort to enjoy life minute by minute, before it turned to vinegar. I'm not going to say it blew my mind, but maybe it should have. Having never had anything so fancy my tongue had no idea how to process it, I think. It was really really good. It was miles above anything I've ever tasted before, but it wasn't pure nirvana. In the end it was a nice champagne for sipping on a tree-top level porch with my love. I wrote down a lot of thoughts about what it takes to drink a bottle of champagne like that, kind of Gourmet Rhapsody style, but I will save that for another time.

During the daily thunderstorms we would grab a glass of something nice and go out onto the porches and talk. I learned some new things about my boy, stories, thoughts and opinions that I had never heard before. Sometimes I forget that we don't know every single thing about each other. We only entered each other's worlds a few (ten!) years ago and there are whole lives full of experiences from pre-us. It's so crazy and fun to learn something new about him and it keeps happening, all the time.

I would kind of like to live in Ohio now.

It's always been our goal to eventually live on some kind of land, and this just reaffirmed how good that would be for our souls.

The only bad thing about the location was the lack of good food (for any trip to be worth its beans it must have great food in my book). We did our best with Wal-Mart's finest, and I hope I'm not offending anyone when I say that their top of the line steak and crab legs were pretty terrible. The best meal we had was a little pasta made with produce and herbs that I'd brought from home. If we did actually live in rural Ohio I guess we'd just have to grow our own steak and crab legs.

I hated to leave, hated it. But gosh darn that real life calls and we dove right back in.