Flatness

I met a woman named Ginny who moved to my Midwestern town from the rolling landscape of Virginia recently. Over President's weekend she took her children skiing in Geneva, WI., to a resort that came highly recommended by her new neighbors. As she drove nearer and nearer to her destination, Ginny kept turning her head and squinting out the frosty windshield. "Where's the mountain?" she asked her husband, who was equally perplexed by the flat, snow-capped fields. He replied: "Probably the skiing's in a ravine."

As they turned into the resort, they kept thinking there must be some mistake. "Where's the mountain?" their children chimed from the middle bench of the minivan.

Where indeed? What was billed to them as a great ski resort turned out to be, in Ginny's words, "like the end of a run where you're just coasting to the chair lift." Not able to work up a sweat, she shivered the entire day. Her kids, who had never skied, loved it and left feeling as if they'd mastered SnowMass.

But it made Ginny homesick. You can't take the landscape with you.

When I moved to New Jersey from Chicago a decade ago, I used to miss the smell of roasting coffee from the Superior plant on the city's north side. I missed the screech of the El and the anonymity you could get riding on it. I missed the deep dish pizza from Lou Malnati's, the gnocchi from Generro's and the many Thai, Indian and Vietnamese foods north of Belmont.

Then I learned about, and came to love, Central New Jersey's many charms. For example, the thin-crust pizza is better there. So is the Madeleine cheesecake, baked in a tiny town called Ringoes, and Lucy's Ravioli. Where I lived just west of Princeton, you never get stuck in traffic if you can avoid Route 1. Hills, pastures, brooks and forests are everywhere you look. The produce at the organic farm in Pennington was so good, my kids even loved beets.

Now we're back in the Midwest. Someday we'll find new great foods--I already like the latte here at Nona's better than Princeton's Small World Coffee; the blts at The Lantern taste great, and I've heard about an organic farm a short distance from town.  I'm looking forward to corn.

Settling in is just a matter of time. That's a small consolation when you're looking for a mountain and wind up shivering on a hill.