Wed, Oct 12, 2011

Well, where have I been since I left off? My dad handed me off to my sister, who took me to her home in St. Joseph, Illinois. That would have been mid-May. It’s a tiny small town just outside of Champaign-Urbana, where Katie and her husband Jared work at the University of Illinois. I spent my time chauffeuring their cat Mackie to the vet, cooking dinners for all of us, getting to know local yogis, biking around, sewing, and shopping.

Almost immediately, I found a skirt at the local farmer’s market that had been thrifted and appliqued. Katie and I both loved it. I bought it and announced my intention to make more. Katie and I rushed to the thrift store and found a pile of skirts I was going to spend all my time transforming. At the fabric store, I tried to judiciously pick a few fabrics for the project. I knew I had everything I needed already, just in storage in San Diego, where I was on a self-imposed fabric-buying restriction.

Katie eased my mind by deciding that if she bought the fabric, I wasn’t breaking my restriction. But having a stack of beautiful fabric is a tricky thing. When you make something, you have to take the risk that it won’t turn out exactly as you envisioned it. Sometimes that’s enough to keep me from starting. I did make a few bags, my fall back project, and two skirts. But it wasn’t quite the burgeoning industry I imagined it might be.

Katie had finally gotten the go-ahead to hire someone in her chronically understaffed office, and if it had been at all possible or appropriate for her to bring me on but not let anyone know I was her sister, I would have happily stayed. After fifteen years on the West Coast, it was so wonderful to spend so much time with my amazing sister. I know I could learn so much from her professionally, too. And I hadn’t even begun to explore all that her university town had to offer.

From my own college experience, I love the idea of Midwestern college towns, with coffee shops, thai food, foreign films and visiting authors and artists mixed with rural landscapes. But I wasn’t ready to stop yet.

As I started planning the next leg of my journey, I tried to figure out how to bike up to Chicago. Having difficulty finding good places to overnight, I felt like my bike traveling skills were already getting rusty. I decided to take a day’s ride to Bloomington-Normal, where I had attended Illinois State. As it happened, Jared was driving to a meeting in Bloomington the day I meant to ride, June 1st, so he drove me and I rode a few miles across town on the Constitution Trail, rather than sixty across the state.

I arranged to stay with Terri Ryburn, an inspiring former professor who has, since she’s retired from ISU, become a stand up comedian, published several plays, and bought an old gas station along Route 66, which she is rehabbing to create a bed and breakfast and historical center.

A little more information about her project is available here: http://www.route66world.com/tag/sprague-station/.

Besides being generally amazing to be around, Terri gave me a tour of a dramatically changed college campus. My old dorm, Walker Hall, has been replaced by a shiny new recreation center.

Here I am with all that’s left of the former Honor’s Dorm and International House.

There are more, taller apartment buildings around campus, and a big hotel and a traffic circle in the uptown, formerly downtown, area of Normal.

They also have some new, very smart signage!

The Coffeehouse looks exactly the same, except for the new part, which doubles it size. Other campus buildings had been upgraded or were under constrction, and we finally had some ivy growing up the side of one of them.

Avanti’s, with its cheap and sweet Italian Bread, had expanded, but was just as busy and delicious as I remembered. Since the advent of Facebook in particular, I’d been taunted by alumni friends passing through town and posting that they stopped to eat at Avanti’s. Now I was there, too, my belly full of glorious carbohydrates! I later realized that I forgot to have their pizza bread, too. I’ll have to return!

I left Terri’s with a bag of vintage buttons to help with my sewing projects, and feeling energized as a writer as well. That I am only writing this out now is an indication of how quickly I moved in both of those directions. It’s hard to feel bad about accomplishing so little, because I feel I have continued to fill my time so joyfully.

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