We made a handful of pilgrimages to central New York when I was a kid. I remember endless hours in the car (Dad took out all the seats in the van one year and set up a TV and nintendo) and the overwhelming feeling of well-being when one stands in the sun, in perfect temperature without sweating or shivering. My parents would catch up with various relatives and we’d spend hours and hours outside, emerald-green grass crunching under bare feet, the sun benevolently warming our shoulders. We’d order gigantic, greasy pizzas, and I watched my “northern” cousins sop up the grease on their slices with a napkin (what??).

Inevitably my mom would pack us into the car and make us drive to the “hole in the rock”. It’s exactly what it sounds like–it’s a large boulder on the side of a road that has an inexplicably perfect 3 foot wide hole in it. No one knows why, no one knows how it got there, but we all knew that it was family tradition to pull over on this nameless country road and take a picture with the hole in the rock.

The second stop of this mini pilgrimage was right around the corner, to a road sign that read “Munson Road”. We lined up in front of the sign and smiled for our parents–it wasn’t our last name, but it was my Mom’s last name and as kids I think we thought it was a mere coincidence. After posing with the road sign, the adults would drive down Munson Road and point out a white house sitting just off the road. At this point, we were tired of being treated like monkeys, so we’d make affirmative sounds and barely look out of the window. My memory of the house was of a stately place, surrounded by lush trees, the shaded yard around it looking tended to, but lonely.

Read pt 2 –>