What is luck?

You make your own, yada yada.

Had a friend who always said we were so lucky. Why? Dunno, just are. It’s our luck to find a dino and a rocking horse hanging out together while we’re first embarking on our trip cross country. 

Maud says, Luck is being afforded an opportunity not of your own making. Also, health and the health of my family. She thinks: Options.   

I’m a bit less lofty. Are you surprised?

Clouds over Pennsylvania. Amazing.

Luck is dipping the most delicious grilled shrimp in the world into the most delicious garlic sauce out of carry-out styrofoam in front of a tv screen choked with monkey pox, soldiers castrated in Ukraine and the kind of massive flood in Kentucky that has people perched on top of rooftops, their life possessions soaked, ruined. It’s not schadenfreude, just being conscious that we are spared – at least for the moment – all the terrible things in the world.

We have so much to be thankful for. It is almost shameful. 

Simplicity: dogs in the back seat, mostly snoozing. Good girl, Ottie.

The end of the day brings us to Mosquito Lake, and specifically the dog park there, outside Youngstown. Get out of the car. Heavenly cool air.

Remembering when Ohio was a marvelous, dangerous, always-startling frontier. Fanny Trollope settled in Cincinnati, determined to capture America in her travelogue—and make her fortune as a writer, which she did. A whip-smart, dowdy, indomitable Briton, she came to 1829 America and her observations caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.

She was broke when she arrived and had never before written a word. No dog parks then, only corduroy roads, tent revivals and the “incessant, remorseless tobacco spitting of American men.”

If you have never read her epic Domestic Manners of the Americans, I will be happy to loan you my copy. 

The dog park at Mosquito Lake rocks. 

Tyson, a lucky German shepherd/husky mix with electric blue eyes, goes algae dunking. 

Beneath the lucky, soaring red oaks, many with multiple stems. 

Mainly today, luck comes in the form of love in the clouds.

Nothing to do but drive, eat, listen to Joni, Both Sides Now, on repeat.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon, as Henry James famously remarked, to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. James liked to drive, or anyway be driven, by his buddy Edith Wharton in her model T on summer afternoons in the English countryside.

A life of luck.

We are privileged. Life on the road, on a vacation, reminds me of this every day. Life, love and luck.