7 - 7A

Amy is going to kill me, because I'm pretty sure she doesn't like this picture. And you know, it's not the most flattering picture I've ever taken of her. Maybe because I was laughing so hard I had to hold my breath to take it? And that was making her laugh? And I don't think either of us knew why exactly we were laughing so hard except it kept getting funnier and funnier?

If you have an extra few hours on a cool, sunny spring Thursday, I highly suggest you take a road trip with my sister. You will have a most excellent time.

I love that drive. We used to take the 401 all the time, which makes no sense, since I live 45 minutes north of the 401 and so does my family. Sure, it feels faster on the 401, because you're driving at 140, and when you take the 7 and 7A, you're lucky to push 100. But the back roads take the same amount of time and way less gas.

On the 7, too, you can stop whenever you want, and you end up in these weird rural way stations. The first place was a complete hardware store. With nails by the pound, and boots, and vacuum bags. The second was a greasy spoon restaurant serving samosas and curry, with a lot of signs in the bathroom telling you how to flush the toilet and to please turn out the lights. I got out of the car and was taken with how clean the air smelled, yellow-green, like those fuzzy tails that hang off of birch trees. The smell of the bathroom hit me even harder, a mauve fake floral sitting in cakes: one on the back of the toilet, one on top of the paper towel rack.

Then there's the dusk. The 7 and 7A take you mostly through countryside, forests and if, you time it right, through farmland as the sun is going down.

As always, being home is a maelstrom of planning with immediate family, aunts and cousins. I find it incredibly frustrating, because none of them are communicating and it's Amy and I trying to figure it out, and mostly Amy on the phone, because I hate that part, and mostly me saying "I don't know, yeah, we could do that then, but oh, we need to be at the hospital by 5, and-" And quite frankly, I'm not sure why most of them want to see us, since we get together and there's nothing to say, nothing in common. But that's blood family for you. Some people you can spend 5 hours in a car with and still think it could have been longer, other people get a begrudging half hour.