Day Two - Blowing through Kansas

Woke up in Des Moines and got on the road mid-morning, hoping to get to Wichita and my brother's place by 4pm ish.  We struck south on I-35, stopping for some lunch outside Kansas City.  I dearly wished to visit a Sonic for the first time in years, and for those of you with Midwestern backgrounds you will understand my longing.  Grilled cheese and cherry limeade!  However, the Behemoth refused to enter its tiny parking lot/drive-in, so we had a mini-argument about where to eat.  Nice.  We argue about strange things when we do argue and ALWAYS in the car.  Maybe its the forced proximity, I don't know.  Afterwards, I took the wheel of Lady Behemoth and attempted to get us through a construction happy KC without driving me insane or running someone over.  Challenging, but we managed.  Then on to slicing through eastern Kansas on 35.  

Home.  Oh, this landscape.  It rings that great big gong in my heart that says, "You're here!  You're home now.  You made it.  Time to stop."  I always think of the people who preceded me in the family line, the great-greats and so on, and I wonder how this landscape spoke to them, what made them stop and build their lives in this place.  Why here?  I wish I could ask.  It makes me incredibly sad to just blow through it on our way, not to mention missing the family that we were passing by.  But we are on a mission.

We made it into Wichita and got to my brother's place by 5pm ish,  Hello, Chris and Lin!  

Punk immediately met the three cats, all of whom ran from her.  Fast.  The two tiger striped ones hid the entire time we were there.  Although Punk eventually found their hiding places, they refused to come out and confront her.  Shao He (Little Black), however, was a different story.  He was not taking any of her shit.  He routinely stood his ground and hissed and spat and made that awesome enraged noise that cats do deep in their throat.  Punk was very gentle with him and respectful of his pissed off space and just stared at him whilst wagging happily, as if to say, "You're a kitty!  Hooray!".  Hilarious.  

We ate my brother's awesome burgers and talked and laughed.  In addition to holding on to a piece of my grandmother's furniture for me, Chris has been holding on to a bunch of miscellaneous items of hers, waiting for me to go through them, mostly kitchen stuff.  The woman saved everything.  Very clearly where our pack rat gene comes from.  We decided on an awesome aluminum locking travel cake dome, some various bits and bobs, candlesticks and tumbled rocks from Colorado trips, and a set of two lidded baskets, one of which will become my sewing basket eventually.  I also selected a couple of her books, one of which was a small press illustrated nature poem, into which she pasted a prayer she wrote herself.  I am so cynical about religion that I often forget how important faith was to her.  I think it was written around the time of her husband's death in 1987, and prays for strength.  This is also around the time we moved back to Kansas, and I would walk to her townhouse after school and spend the rest of the afternoon playing gin rummy and double solitaire with her in the kitchen and watching Square One on PBS.  I miss her.