Journey to the Center of the Awesome: Taking Mountain Home

It had been a long time since we had been to Mountain Home in the summer...much less since our entire Gamelin family had been together all at once.  It has taken me more years than I'd like to count, but I finally understand why my parents elected to leave the frozen North and head South to live on the lake in Northern Arkansas.  It's a resort area for a reason.  The Ozark Mountains are beautiful--getting to see them from the air as we flew into the Branson airport took my breath away.  Somehow I always forget how many trees there are...all of them just rolling endlessly into the horizon.  The South can get a bad rap for many (just) reasons, but don't tell me the land in my hometown isn't breathtaking.

We made a few stops on the way to my parents house--one to fill up on some good old Southern food and another to give Uncle Joe some hugs before finally crashing for the night.  It's always strange coming home to my old house.  I spent so many years there, the juxtaposition of how things have changed so much while remaining the same never fails to send me reeling.  This time I was floored to find that mom had converted Joe's old room into Audrey and Bailey's room.  The walls were decorated with the butterflies that used to hang over the girls' crib, two kid-sized beds lay on each side of the room, separated by a desk full of toys and art supplies.  Grandma had thought of everything and my girls settled in, knowing they had a permanent place at Grandma and Grandpa's house--a little sanctuary meant just for them.



There's a method to introducing oneself back to Mountain Home.  "Visiting" is the official pastime of choice and there are respects that must be made before one can feel officially settled.  Naturally, the first stop was to see my Grandparents, Aunt Connie and Aunt Patty.  Together, we're all members of the official Gamelin Complex--a dream a very long time in the making for my Grandparents to be surrounded by their children.  It's incredibly satisfying to see my kids getting folded into the same little flock too.  I have so many happy memories of spending time with my extended family growing up, I want my kids to have as much experience as they can with that as they can too.  They'll never know what it was like to have my Grandma take them swimming at the lake, snacking on peanuts and worthers original candies while playing "I Spy"to while away the afternoon, but they know what it's like to hear threats of being squished like a bug for being caught in Great Grandpa's chair and they've met all the stuffed animals who live at Great Grandma & Grandpa's house...and piled all of them on top of Great Grandma to boot.


Next on our list of places to visit is always Grandma's flower shop--a magical place filled with brand new stuffed animals, (all of them in desperate need of hugging), flowers that all must be dutifully sniffed, balloons begging to be inflated and, best of all, a pottery studio full of all the clay and tools you'd ever need to make...well....anything really...as my Mom has proved on multiple occasions in the form of fish whistles and every dish known to man.  The girls love donning aprons here,
getting to poke, prod and squish clay into whatever form their little minds like.  Grandma glazes and fires anything these two put their hands to.

Just like that pottery studio was "never there" when I was growing up, there was a new addition to our regularly-scheduled "visits" this year.  My brother's girlfriend, Catherine, is an incredible cook and baker.  And when I say "incredible", I want you to hold in your mind the best food you've ever eaten and then double the satisfaction you felt in eating it.  That is how EVERYTHING this woman makes tastes.  Words will always fail to describe it accurately.  Just know that you are missing out unless you've had the pleasure of frequenting the Blackbird Cafe--a joint Catherine's sister runs and where her baked goods are available for the good people of Mountain Home...like ourselves...to enjoy.  The cafe is attached to Mountain Home's beautiful new library (I worked at the other one as a teen.  This one was never there.) and does a bustling bit of business.  Having defected from the birthplace of Starbucks to the land of coffee houses, it can be shocking, returning to discover that my hometown is a tragic wasteland when it comes to finding a decent cup of Joe...until now.  I sat in that little cafe, enjoying an expertly brewed latte and dying of happiness a little bit every time I took a bite of my magical caramel pecan-pie cake.  Everyone else at the table was experiencing similar levels of nirvana...including Audrey, who only grudgingly allowed me a minuscule taste of her cake, which was otherwise devoured in it's entirety.

Trekking down to the lake is something we don't often get to do on our Christmastime visits back home, but this time, playing in the water was the biggest event outside of eating.  Our girls are water babies--always have been. And there is no greater joy to be found than the sight of a lake and a beach filled with rocks to be thrown into it.  We started out that first day in clothes and soon let the girls strip down to undies and shoes and let them try to fill the lake with rocks.  The grown-ups showed off their rock skipping skills (Dad wins, hands down) and made a fire for hotdog and marshmallow roasting.
Back at Grandma's house there was homemade ice cream dished up in homemade waffle cones after a big swim in Grandma's enormous tub.


       
   


All this, and Emily and Mike hadn't even arrived yet. When they flew into Branson, Mom and Dad took the girls with them as a surprise, leaving John and me to our own devices...and also without car keys to the prius.  We were either stranded at the house or faced with the alternative of taking Beau into town...an old van so majestic you'd have to be personally acquainted to understand the full gravity of this decision.  I was thrilled.  John, not so much.  But, we made it to town and completed our errands before Emma and Mike made it to the house.  The silver lining in all this was that the two of us got to stop by Popeye's chicken, binge eat our amazing lunch and still fit in a food-coma-induced nap before Emma and Mike made it to the house.

I apologize for nothing

Once the gang was all together, we were running on all cylinders. My mother, the anti-napper, and her co-conspirator, my sister, had us running every minute of the day.  Luckily, the kind of activities they plan are really quite fun; visiting family, planning meals, making pie (with sprinkles!) and swimming in the lake are just a few of the things we got to enjoy on a daily basis.  We also got to visit Joe and Catherine at their place on the river for the first time.  Together, they had planned a festive Tacoberfest celebration for the family and also invited us over for a brunch that could have easily served as my last meal on Earth.  As it was, I decided to allow everyone present to side-step the inconvenience of dealing with the disposal of a grinning corpse and, instead, just kept on living, knowing full well I'll never eat a brunch so tasty again.

Eventually, it was time for the boys to leave us; Mike and John flew out of Branson and Springfield within 24 hours of each other, so we made a bit of a pilgrimage out of it, spending the night in Springfield and catching up with our friends, Shannon and Deborah, while we were there.  Springfield has a reputation for offering a broad swath of excellent restaurants, so it should be no surprise that we kept right on the binge-eating gravy train while we were there.  We managed to fit in a Middle Eastern lunch, hibachi & sushi for dinner, Andy's frozen custard for dessert and Cracker Barrel for breakfast.  There were certainly happy bellies, but heavy hearts, knowing John was heading back to Vienna without us.  We're rather fond of being all together, but we knew that good things would still be coming to us while we were apart.

John's "good things" came more in the form of building character as he endured delays in his international travel and then two weeks of living in Vienna as a bachelor.  It was comparatively quite easy for us to drive back to Mountain Home where there was still plenty of fun to be had.  Still, Dad and Joe were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the womenfolk.  Mom and Emily kept the ball rolling every day with all the cooking and baking, ice cream and trips to the lake.  Mostly, I drifted from food coma to food coma with a smile on my face.  We girls did all manage to take a trip together to Eureka Springs on a rare day off for Cathrine.  We spent the day poking around shops in the quaint downtown area, which was really difficult for Bailey to endure. The hight point for her, though, was making the acquaintance of the world's nicest art gallery owner. This lovely woman welcomed my crazy girl into her showroom, encouraged her to play some xylophones that she had on display and even showed us to some prints of the cow paintings that were the main draw of her collection--the main reason we had popped our heads in to begin with.  My newly livestock-crazed Bear picked out a print of a sweet cow named "Jackie" and I gave myself a pat on the back for surviving a trip to an art gallery with the proverbial bull in a china shop.

In the end, it was just an amazing blessing to get to spend so much time in my hometown.  Emily had to leave before us, but we knew it would only be a week before we'd see her again in Maryland. Most of the visiting I do with my family feels cut short--like I never get to truly settle in to just being with family.  In stark contrast, this trip just felt rich...decadent even; It was so nice to be able to reassure my Grandparents that we'd be around a while and be seeing them many times over before it was time to go. We were there long enough to really feel the rhythm of being home.  But, maybe the best part was knowing that when I left Mountain Home, most of my family would be coming with us.  We still had two more legs left of our home leave trip and we were loving every minute of it.