Poughkeepsie for the 4th of July

Corrie's cousin Josh and I missed having the same birthday by a few hours. He's older by a day in technical terms. It was with him and his then-girlfriend Elizabeth that we bunked in Kingston, NY right when we first moved to the east coast back in 2006.

Kingston, just over an hour and a half from the City up the Hudson, was a wild introduction to the humidity, summer thunderstorms, and the general lushness of the northern Atlantic states in the summer.

Now he and his wife Elizabeth live in a nifty starchetect-designed house in Poughkeepsie, the last stop on the Metro North Hudson-line out of Grand Central, about 90 minutes from town. (More on the house coming later.)

Josh and Elizabeth have two daughters: Emlyn, who at four and half years old is a very witty and chatty young lady who never seems to stop talking. I think she's saying something right as Josh took this picture:

Their younger daughter, Juniper, is barely two months old, and wasn't photographed by me here. Where Marc and Linda have a 4.5 year old and a 3 year old, Josh and Elizabeth have a 4.5 year old and a 2 month old.

Cass went from being the youngest baby to the only baby to the middle baby on this trip.

The visit was way, way too short, as we could just talk with Josh and Elizabeth for hours. We got to play on a slip and slide (Cass was a little too frightened to go for a ride), check out their trampoline in the basement, collect some help from Emlyn during bathtime:

And purchase---and then set off---a big ol' package of fireworks:

Josh and I had gone to the grocers to purchase dinner fixings before heading to their wildly complete beer store when I saw the package: it was only forty bucks and overflowing with the kinds of wares we never got as a kid back in Northern California. It wasn't as cool as that mortar year back at the Farm in 2004 (when I met Corrie's extended family), but it was a helluva time.

The next morning while Corrie loaded up the car I fielded advice from my dad's older sister, my Auntie Clare, pertaining to the best ways to get to the Bronx for our Yankee game. She lived in the Bronx for years as a student at Fordham and now she and Uncle Henry live in Bedford, a ritzy town east of Dobbs Ferry, and our staging ground for the last two nights in New York.

Auntie Clare gave good advice: we found the easy and affordable parking places at the Mount Kisco train stop, took it in to Harlem, switched to the subway, and made it to the ballgame.