Many of my college cross country teammates lived close enough to Chicago that their parents could drive to our meets or offer to host the smelly, disheveled bunch of us on our way from wherever we were competing back to campus.
I loved these visits to other homes. It always felt like such an act of profound intimacy to see the home where all these people I’d me just as they were leaving those homes and trying on whatever new identities might separate them from the people they’d been in childhood. My family lived 800 miles away—too far to be a reasonable pit-stop from UW-Oshkosh to Hyde Park—and although I did often feel a twinge of homesickness to eat someone else’s favorite home-cooked meal, the overall effect was to sense a meaningful support network in those first years living away from my family.
One of my teammates, Peter, became a close and lifelong friend and I visited his parents’ house often in the years I lived in the midwest. Once, the year I was living in Madison, although Peter was working in Korea, his mom invited my then-boyfriend and I over for Easter where I had lemon meringue pie for the first time.
At Peter’s house, there was a cement goose that lived on the front step. The goose was always seasonally attired. I did not grow up with a porch goose, but I loved this one and one of my favorite things about visiting his family’s house was checking out the goose’s outfit. I was delighted to read this passage in Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland:
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