good use of an hour

home sweet home

Several weeks ago a friend from high school and I went to the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. We stumbled on a bunch of works by this one artist, Robert Valicenti, who we think is the dad of another girl from our home town. Our horse-filled nook of suburban Chicago is fond of McMansions and cookie-cutter architecture, and I've often wondered if all of surburban middle America sports the same style. I'm still not sure, and I bet there's a local flavor to this particular pile of bland. Despite the generic-ness, none of us ever went the extra step of lampooning our home town in a national museum, which is where Mr. V. stepped in to help. One of Valicenti's works involved taking pictures of McMansions and superimposing commercial signs for big-box retailers--Walmart, McDonalds, etc. My friend actually identified one as the house across the street from where she grew up. So she went home and took a picture, and here it is.





My parents' house is different, not only because it's smaller and older and actually has trees, but more importantly because it holds a special place in the hearts of frogs. After a week of torrential rains flooded northwest Illinois, a horde of nomadic amphibians hopped out of their swampy homes and invaded the driveways and lawns of John Q. Public. Eventually most of that water seeped away or evaporated, leaving them to bake into little flat frog cakes. My parents' garage, it turns out, is where many of them chose to end their days, in the holy land of parked cars and garbage bins. We'd come home in the evenings and discover five or so new frog bodies lying on the concrete floor. My mom renamed it the frog mausoleum.