This week I’m writing to you from a village north of Chicago. My husband and I drove our boys on a long trek to get here in one day, and now they’ve been enjoying their first week at “Babcia” and “Dzia Dzia’s” house. (Those are the Polish words for grandma and grandpa, and they are pronounced BOP-cha and JA-JA.)
My four-year-old has been here before, but he doesn’t remember it. He knows his Babcia very well from her long visits to our house, so he was extremely excited to get to visit her house. And as promised, her neighborhood is very different from ours.
I have not seen the large yards and wooded areas that we are lucky to have in Barrow County. The yards here are small, but that doesn’t keep the owners from making the best of them. Babcia and Dzia Dzia have beautiful flowers, a perfect lawn (that matches everyone else’s lawn in the neighborhood), and they have a small place behind their garage that they grow vegetables.
A chain link fence divides their garden from their neighbor’s, but a cucumber plant has curled its tendrils through the wire, and the friendly neighbor tells my son he can have the cucumber growing on Babcia’s side.
There are more fireflies here than I’ve ever seen in our woods back in Georgia, and a relative showed my boy how to catch them. There are two apple trees, and Dzia Dzia says the fruit is not very good, so he allows the boys to pull them off and throw them into the big spruce trees. The light-colored brick houses on my in-laws street are identical. They are rectangular, ranch homes with the short side facing the street. I would guess most of the homes around here were built in the 60s or 70s, but some of the homes on adjacent streets are quite charming and cottage-looking. Flowers and ivy are abundant.
Unlike the open spaces we have in Georgia, there are no more available lots anywhere around Chicago. If someone wants to build a new home, they buy an old house and have it razed, so there are a few big, brick modern homes in the neighborhood too.
What I appreciate most about this suburbia are the parks. There are two fabulous parks within a short walk from my in-laws house! There are two more a short drive away. What a treat for a mama who is used to driving 20-30 minutes to find a park so that my boys can expel some of their energy.
Before a vacation such as this, my usual relaxed self in regards to “germs” is taken over by an over-anxious mama carrying a bottle of hand sanitizer everywhere I go. I have always been the kind of person who gets sick easily, so I’ve had plenty of vacations ruined by illness.
My plan worked only so well this time. My boys didn’t get sick, but somehow I came down with a bad cold a few days after arriving in Chicago. So I missed out on their excursion to the botanical garden, which is huge and beautiful this time of year.
I did perk up enough to share in my son’s very anticipated first ride on a subway train. Ah, if it were only this easy to please children all their lives. My son was all smiles and exclamations on the long trip to downtown Chicago. He was quite a contrast to the crowds of people sitting and standing next to us who had clearly been riding the subway all their lives.
My youngest boy seemed a little overwhelmed by the subway and our walk around downtown, but he’s quick to adapt, and his keen mama took note of how he liked to slide his fingers along the big glass store windows as we walked by.
I’m staying positive in hopes that no one else will be sick on this vacation. Hopefully next week I’ll have another report on our excursions in the big city to the north.
Shelli Bond Pabis is a Winder resident and columnist for the Barrow Journal. You can reach her at writetospabis@gmail.com.
