Over Easter weekend, we traveled to Ohio.
That’s right. My wife Tia and I braved gas station restrooms, 18-wheelers hogging the fast lane, and horizons lingering over unplowed cut-cornstalk fields that have no end. Our dog Summer held it in the entire trip, a bladder worth considering, especially as mine never passes a rest area it doesn’t regret not stopping for.
We drove down Maundy Thursday, the day Jesus hosted the Last Supper. Ironically, we had our First Supper. That is, for the first time in a year, we ate inside a restaurant.
Skyline Chili is a thing in Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University, where my daughter Molly teaches as a visiting professor. For months people from Ohio told us to check out the chili, an experience we’d either love or hate.
Walking into Skyline Chili and sitting at a table felt foreign, revolutionary. A few minutes after ordering a salad, soup and Skyline chili for four, a platter of thin spaghetti blanketed in dark meat sauce over yellow grated cheese appeared. It tasted like spaghetti and meat sauce. Chili? What chili? Where’re the beans?
After dinner we drove to our rented cottage in Hueston State Park. Imagine a larger Lake Shabbona offering as many cabins as a northern Wisconsin summer camp for parents wanting to dump their kids, understanding they’ll come home knowing how to nock an arrow, backwater a canoe, and cut firewood using a hatchet without losing toes.
The cabin was rustic. How rustic? The dish towel resembled a large piece of plaid Swiss cheese with more holes (all lovingly fringed) than cheese.
Next day we drove to the farm where Molly lives. On the way she told us about a dog that flies off a front lawn and runs beside her car barking insanely at the vehicle’s impudence. Suddenly, there it was, eager to eat the car and its inhabitants. We slowed to a crawl, then stopped, letting Cujo bark itself out.
We crisscrossed west down an unseparated two-lane, then south down an unseparated two-lane, the land like the vast, flat fields Hitchcock chose for Cary Grant’s inimitable chase scene in “North by Northwest.” Any minute I expected to be buzzed by a crop duster piloted by a maniacal murderer, but no such luck.
Her one-room Airbnb cottage was attached to the main farmhouse, everything fenced to allow, Nestle, a chocolate brown horse, formerly a barrel racer, to roam and graze. Once when Molly came home from grocery shopping, she took one bag inside and returned to find Nestle nosing into a plastic container of cucumber salad.
On Easter Sunday we walked a path through woods beside the lake where pontoon boats, ducks and geese floated lazily. I let Molly and Tia go ahead and listened to the forest. A pileated woodpecker hammered its beak somewhere nearby but remained elusive, its presence better imagined than seen. The brown-crusted leaf floor was sprinkled with pink spring beauties and rue anemone; white bloodroot and Dutchman’s breeches; and purple cress and hepatica.
The forest survived the frozen, gray winter and now reemerged with color and light. Easter is about returns, and standing there surrounded by leafless trees, I think about how lucky I am to be there, smelling the slightly moist and rotting leaves, hearing the chatter of birdsong and about to taste some delicious sandwiches, our Easter banquet, a picnic by the lake.
And then it will be time for our return.