Outfit details:

necklace – vintage, Brooklyn flea market / purse – custom via etsy / jacket – Zara / wood & brass bangle – vintage, thrifted / watch – La Mer / pink striped sweater – H&M / pink button-down – custom / jeans – Target / brogues – Primark

I come from a family of road trippers. In 1972, my parents bought a light blue Ford van that my dad outfitted with a table and fold-up beds in the back; for years, they would spend months at a time camping in that van, driving all over the western US. (They kept the van for over 25 years, although I don’t think it ran once during the last seven – by then it was my own personal ‘spaceship’ in the back of the driveway.)  Even after the van-age ended, we never flew for family vacations. Every summer, it was simply a question of whether we’d be driving from Virginia north to Maine or south to the Carolinas and beyond. Since leaving home, I’ve kept the tradition alive, driving from Virginia to Florida, Boston to Toronto, New Jersey to Maine and all back again, in some cases many times over. 

Yet despite having lots of great trip memories to choose from, when Lisa first asked me to guest post for her while she’s off on her (enviable) road trip to Texas, I immediately knew I would be writing about my own, not-so-enviable road trip to Texas almost two decades ago. While I can’t exactly call this trip a favorite, it’s by far my most vividly and viscerally remembered.

The summer before I turned nine, my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctors in Fort Worth recommended an immediate mastectomy, and while her two sons lived far away on opposite coasts, everyone felt it was important for her to have some family around while recovering from her surgery.

So we drove.

We drove for three straight days, from our inside-the-beltway northern Virginia house to my grandmother’s single-story in Forth Worth, Texas. The air conditioning broke on the afternoon of the first day. We did not stop.

We had a big cardboard box full of (vintage, I’m sure) Nancy Drew books that had been handed down to me by my older cousin, and I lay down in the backseat and read the entire way. We’d stop for gas or food every few hours, and I’d grab three more unread Nancy Drews from the trunk and toss in the ones I’d finished. I knew cancer was serious stuff, but I really had no idea what to expect when we got to my grandmother’s – would she be bedridden? Bald? Was she going to die? – so I immersed myself in conquering my box of books, only pausing to ask if we could stop the car when we got to the banks of the Mississippi.

I had read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and associated a great deal of romanticism with Mississippi river mud. When we got the river, my dad pulled off the highway and found a place where we could walk all the way down to the water. In the heat of mid-summer, the river was low and deep brown, and the banks had grown into endless mud flats, littered with discarded toilets and other flotsam. My mother gamely picked her way through the mess with me, so that I could sink my toes into the mud of the American ur-river. I did; it was squishy; I was surprised not to have any epiphanies. We headed back to the car and drove on.

When we finally got to Fort Worth and went to see my grandmother in the hospital, I was surprised and relieved to find her neither bedridden, nor bald, nor in immediate risk of death. On the contrary, she was lively and cheerful, simply a little more asymmetrical than she’d always been. A lifelong religious zealot (she’d grown up believing dancing to be sinful), she shocked me by whipping down the front of her hospital gown in front of the entire family to show us her surgery site. After days of wondering what to expect, she completely demystified her illness to me in about three minutes; to this day she still happily shows off her prosthesis to anyone who’ll stop to chat.

That hot and endlessly long drive made quite an impression on me, although I now have no memory of our return journey. On our drive to Texas, I had read 23 Nancy Drew books. (Obviously, I wanted to be like George. Didn’t we all?) I had memorized every line of stitching in the blue velvet upholstery of our Nissan’s back seat. I had stood on the banks of the Mississippi and squished my illusions between my toes. I had consumed an ungodly number of McNuggets. While I still can’t quite look back on that trip fondly, it will always remain for me a marker of a particular moment in my childhood.

Be sure to visit Emily’s blog, The Other Emily!