Because she’s experienced vision problems in the past few years and my mother can no longer drive her car, a visit back home for me now means I do my “Driving Miss Daisy” thing, taking Mom to some of the places she enjoys but can no longer visit on her own.
I was in Ohio last week and my agenda for the trip was to rake leaves in Mom’s yard and do other fall/pre-winter home maintenance jobs, but Mom had other plans in mind. She’d allow me to rake for an hour or so, then she’d stand in front of me in the yard and say: “I don’t want you to work all the time you’re here. Let’s go someplace fun.”
So, as we nearly always do when I’m back home, we got in the car and drove to Holmes County, Ohio’s “Amish Country.” We poked around in a store that caters to the Amish -- the store is full of candles, oil lamps, wood stoves, and other non-electrical items the Amish use -- and we had lunch at our usual spot, a little country diner that serves big, working-person plates of food for small, middle-America prices (check total for two lunches: $5.)
Another day we visited Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, one of the schools where Mom studied. I took photographs of amazing fall colors outside the Conservatory building, and, as students strolled by, I joked with Mom that I could remember a time when I was in high school and Oberlin students seemed mature, sophisticated, and artist-fringe-intellectual to me. All the students I saw last week, however, looked so very young... my joke’s unstated punch line being that either I’ve gotten much older and my perceptions have changed, or Oberlin College now has a student body comprised of 13-year-olds.
