Ithaca is gorges.*

I spent a little time in Ithaca earlier this week at the Ivies+ conference held at Cornell. What a good time. First of all, the drive there was just wonderful. The sky was bright and sunny and the temperature warm. The hills were rolling and the country was perfectly agrarian. I saw cows and horses and fresh hay bales. It was like a little bit of Vermont in upstate New York.

And then there was Ithaca. I don't have much experience with upstate New York other than a night spent in Liverpool, a few drives across state on my way to Canada, and a weekend in Cooperstown, but Ithaca was a lot livelier than I expected. I wish I had more time to spend there, but what I saw of it was nice, including the Courtyard Marriott, which had a remarkably equipped fitness room for the size of the hotel. The city is at the base of one of the Finger Lakes, Cayuga Lake, and is all hills and streams and gorges, like this one that runs right through the Cornell campus. There are wineries and walking trails and all kinds of great stuff to do and see. I wish I had had more time to spend there, but I know it's a place I'll go back to.

And what about Cornell? I was mightily impressed with the campus and the buildings and the views, as you may have by now suspected. It reminded me so much of the UConn campus, but a Storrs on steroids. I found myself wondering what it would have been like to learn there, to spend some formative years there, but then found myself wondering what it would be like to work there, to spend some of my working life there. It's such a self-contained little world, but with ties to the wider world. There are partnerships between the Cornell libraries and those of Columbia, and buses run frequently from Ithaca to NYC. The winters there would probably do me in, but if the summers are anything like the days that I spent there then sign me up. The air was clean and cool and the greenery! It was almost too much for me. That part of me that craves wide-open space and rolling hills was throbbing with desire.

But yes, yes - as you know, this does tend to happen to me. This location-envy. Every time I go somewhere new I find myself imagining myself living there, thriving there, prospering in ways that I am not (or don't think that I am) prospering at home. I always have to remind myself that real life would catch up to me no matter where I lived. That I'd love working at Mann Library or Olin for a year, but then the novelty would probably wear off and it would become a job, work, just like everything else. It's fun to imagine, though, and it's fun to escape the realities of life for a while and imagine something new. It's also fun, though, to come home from those places and be greeted by my rose bush, or my cats or the quilt on my bed, because all of that reminds me that I am prospering at home, that I do have a home, that my home is here and my life is good now, and that I can go and visit Ithaca anytime I want and soak in all of its natural splendor and then come home to what's comfortable. Maybe someday I'll make a move, when Doug and I feel the time is right, but for now I am content going to these neat little places and dreaming of a different life, only to come home to a reality that really is quite good after all.

*I apologize for re-using that well-used slogan, but I can't help it. It's so apt.