The sun will dip in and out of view before taking refuge behind clouds that overtook the sky. After ensuring that the light of day had, in fact, returned, I turned to deal with breakfast. Growing tired of restaurants, I’d decided the night before that we’d have our first meal of the day in the cabin. Last night I made a solo trip to Oswego to find the place has two grocery stores, a couple of small markets, a health food store, a bookstore, and even a university. I had been looking for a bakery but had to make do with one of the groceries. With a bottle of orange juice and a loaf of the firmest whole-grain bread I could find, breakfast was in hand.
Following my errand into town and still needing more me time after Mom went to sleep, I went out to the patio of our cabin. With my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed a spider starting work on a new web. I can’t say I ever stopped to watch this process before. How wonderful watching two right legs position themselves on two different strands of web, apparently measuring tension, while three other legs, one right and two left, weave the web and pull in the slack web. The spider would then grab hold of an overhead strand, and while it scooted across the length of the web, it let out another strand that was connected to the opposite side. Next, it would drop down, riding yet another strand to a lower horizontal piece of the web to connect it, crawl up the new strand, climb over, and descend, dropping another new part of the web. Wow, this is pretty cool, basic to probably almost anyone else, but sitting here in the darkness with a streetlight placing the spider into silhouette was an incredible moment for me.
Near the edge of the campsites and under a few of the trees, fireflies came up out of the grasses to make an appearance. Nothing like what we saw in Iowa but still a delightful sight. When I finally attempted to find some sleep, the room was still baking. With a fan sitting on a chair blowing directly at my head, I was soon off to sleep.
Today, we are visiting the Finger Lakes region before going into Buffalo. The lakes are not far from where we stayed, next to Lake Ontario. We pass through Seneca Falls before getting our first view of Cayuga Lake. Not far south from that, we come across the first winery that catches Mom’s eye, Swedish Hills. It’s only 9:15, and the winery isn’t officially open, but the owner is in the store and obliges our early morning visit. Mom is hunting for cherry wines, and although she wasn’t able to get one here, she did find a great raspberry wine, a Svenska Red, a Mareschal Foch, and a Delaware white. As I don’t know a thing about wines, I can’t offer anything beyond their names.
We go so far south as Ithaca but find little to get excited about from this historic town that boasts having Cornell University at the center of its universe. Maybe it was the heavy traffic or what appeared to be a poor downtown area in regards to shopping and eating possibilities, but whatever it was, we were soon gone.
The next lake we visited among the “Fingers” was Seneca Lake, just west of Cayuga Lake. Around lunch, we stop at a lakeside restaurant but are chased away by flies and the absence of any staff to seat us. Over in Geneva, we spot a small place down a one-way street I turn up the wrong way to get to. We have club sandwiches at the Flower Petal Café and are happy we did so.
Geneva is a city that has seen better days. It’s been down but looks to be making a comeback. Our hope is that it works as it is ideally situated along the lakes, has beautiful architecture, and has the layout for a great community life that would play well to tourism.
In the small village of Williamson, we stopped at a great fruit and ice cream stand that was selling fresh homegrown raspberries, tiny plums, and local black cherries that were outstanding. The real draw of this place is the ice cream, though. Mom grew up eating Perry’s ice cream, and to this day, it is her favorite. I will attest to the fact that the vanilla with fresh raspberries would be hard to surpass.
Pultneyville is a town that demands a repeat visit. This may have been the standout place of the day, but Buffalo surely wasn’t. The other nice finds were Appleton and Newfane. In Appleton, Mom and I stopped at the Maryjim Manor Winery in a beautiful old mansion. Mom struck gold with three different types of cherry wines, the second case of wine bought today.
Not long after passing through Lockport, we entered the outskirts of Buffalo. In Buffalo, our first stop had to be Bocce Club Pizza, an old favorite of Mom and me. Armed with a 2-liter bottle of Loganberry juice, we eat till we are stuffed and likely will start showing signs of having diabetes. The remainder of the pizza is in the backseat, and we begin our tour of places where mom grew up and where I lived as a small child.
Here we are on Nadon Place, where I would stay with my mother’s parents when I wasn’t staying with my father’s parents or my Aunt Eleanor and Great-Grandmother Josephine or my Aunt Lillian and Uncle Joe or Aunt Anne and Uncle Woody. To be honest, this was the one place I enjoyed the least as my grandma Hazel, whom my father affectionately referred to as Witch Hazel, was a stickler for the order of things and was adamant that we wouldn’t make messes in her prim and proper home. This is also the home my mother grew up in until that fateful summer day almost exactly 43 years ago when she got pregnant by a high school senior named John Michael Wise. When I consider that my mom conceived me somewhere between July 10 and July 19, 1962, and that we’re here revisiting her old haunts during those pivotal days as a kind of anniversary return, I gotta say I’m kinda freaked out.
Anderson’s Custard because you can never eat enough ice cream in a single day. This location on Sheridan Drive was mom’s favorite and turned out to be halfway between her parent’s house and the first apartment I would live in before my sister Shari was born. I’m starting to think that the flavor of vanilla and the smell of yeast are the main ingredients of diabetes. Is it even safe to eat this much sugar in a day?
Sheridan Park is a ghetto of low-income deprivation. Here at 33 Burns Court in the Sheridan Park community of Tonawanda in Buffalo, New York is where my mom spent her pregnancy until shortly before I was born in April 1963. Back then, it was the lowest-income neighborhood in Buffalo, though today, it doesn’t look as bad as some of the other places we’ve already driven past. Even with that comparison, this place is just plain scary.
1051 Sheridan Drive was Franks Queen City Grille that was still operating when we came through and was the place of Mom’s first waitressing job. Franks is long gone as I write this, as is the place that took it over. From our apartment, it was just a half-mile around the corner to this joint.
Mom has some fond memories of Grand Island, which is where we went to find a place to stay at the Chateau Motor Lodge. The $70 seemed to be on the pricey side for the hot and humid room with a pipsqueak of an air conditioner that left me sweating like a pig for another night. Of course, it could also be sweat associated with getting stuffed like the aforementioned animal. Speaking of food, I should point out that there was still the matter of a little something for dinner with Mom asking the guy at the motel desk for a recommendation for Texas Hots, which are also called Greeks that drew us in like wolves on a fresh kill. Long live food, and to hell with our waistlines.
