Since I had to pick up my stepsibilings from the airport at 11PM and I was still vaguely on PST, staying up until midnight to collect my luggage was no big deal. Naturally, given how the trip’s been going so far, I got lost for half an hour after leaving the hospital. On the up side, I was lost in a straight line. Oh, and there was a Dunkin’ Donuts along the route, so I pretended it was on purpose and moved on to the airport. (I honestly didn’t think Dunkin’ Donuts could get any more perfect, but this one had a flatscreen TV, wifi – which the French pronounce “weefee” by the way – and a lounge area. Come to mama!)
One of the kids returned from holiday with a set of golf clubs which is almost bigger than he is and definitely too big for The Speck. With all due respect to Papa Tiger, who gives a thirteen-year-old golf clubs for his birthday? We wedged the clubs in with the three teenagers, I dropped them off, turned around, went back to the airport, collected my bag off its (overdue) flight and, in a fit of organizational insanity, decided to drive the two and a half hours to my grandmother’s at 1AM instead of wasting daylight hours on the road that I could otherwise spend at the hospital on Monday.
For reasons only known to the Transportation Department, two very long sections of the highway headed south are under construction simultaneously. These sections are so long – fourteen miles each – that there is no way that the states of New York and Pennsylvania could possibly have enough employees to work on them continuously. It’s like going into a university classroom and saving all the seats just in case everyone you’ve ever met shows up for the lecture. One stretch has walls on both sides which is unnerving for someone who is exhausted, claustrophobic and rapidly losing her visual grip on anything smaller than a semi. That merged right into the six-mile gauntlet that is the back road to my grandmother’s house. I narrowly avoided two deer in the fog and made up for it by driving over a felled tree in the road with my Speck. I arrived at 3AM, wrote for an hour and collapsed.
I get up, my grandmother feeds me breakfast, then coffee. I make rosettes, a deceptively simple Swedish cookie which involves a lot of hot oil and a special iron, while she makes more coffee. Halfway through the hot oil part, she starts making lunch. We have cookies. We have lunch. She gives me twenty dollars “for the rental car,” and I hit the road for the drive back to the hospital.
Five hours, two meals, three coffee breaks. I don’t see how we didn’t all grow up fat and diabetic.
I would like to say, for the record, that I have repeatedly and with an extremely positive attitude, tried the donuts at Tim Hortons, the Canadian donut competition to Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts, and I am sorry to report that they completely suck. I love Canada but, yes I’ll say it, I love donuts more and theirs are terrible. I have been to Tim Hortons several times over the years but I tend to always eat the same donuts – raised or chocolate – so this time I went Bill Nye on them. To make sure I wasn’t generalizing, I bought a box of donut holes – or “Timbits” as they call them – two each of sour cream, glazed sour cream, cake, raised glazed and chocolate glazed. They were all equally awful. This is because they all taste exactly the same even though they’re all different textures. (I hate tofu for the same reason.) I couldn’t tell you what this flavor is specifically, but I’m betting it’s a blend of hazelnuts and Dawn. 
Displaced 