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Now that the earth has rolled 550 miles beneath our wheels away from Indiana, I find myself thinking back about our visit to the Hoosier State and ahead to our return to New York.

The anticipation about being back in the Empire State and in our own beds again is tempered a bit by what I — and I mean I, because my wife, Bonnie, is allergic to dust — am going to face before we resettle into that comfort zone. I’ll get to the math later, but we are being awaited by two cats who have been oversupplied with food, water — and litter.

Back to Indiana for a moment. One of the things the state celebrated while we were there — other than the fact that we were there, of course — was that a young fellow from West Lafayette, Ind., won the Scripps national spelling bee. Now I’m fairly sure Sameer Mishra, 13, doesn’t come from an old Indiana family, but folks there were pretty happy about his victory. The runnerup, by the way, was a 12-year-old from Michigan by the name of Sidharth Chand.

Ah, the Midwest. Not everybody there grows soybeans and corn, although my father-in-law did a fine job of it for many years. Young Sameer says he’s going to be a neurosurgeon, and I believe him.

Other things I have learned over the years about Indiana. You might call it Indianiana:

• Much of the state, like much of its citizenry, is very quiet. Especially the town of Warren, just south of Huntington, where we stayed for four days. It’s so quiet that when I was up in the middle of one night to have a cold glass of soda, I had to slide the ice cubes into the plastic glass sideways to avoid waking Bonnie, then found the sound of the soda fizzing over the ice so loud that it caused her to stir. I told her later that what I needed was not Diet Pepsi but Quiet Pepsi. She thought that was funny (I think).

• No one is quite sure about the origin of the word ‘Hoosier,’ although it’s been used since the 1830s by Indianans, few of whom, by the way, refer to themselves as ‘Indianans.’ Some claim there was an early construction contractor named Samuel Hoosier who liked to hire Indiana men for their good work habits. Some trace it to the Polish word for ‘hussar’ used by Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish aristocrat who fought alongside the colonists in the American Revolution and for whom a county in Indiana is named. Some say it was just the corruption of a common phrase used by Indiana settlers for strangers approaching their cabins — “Who’sh ‘ere? (Who’s there?).”

• Place names in Indiana also can be a source of bemusement. A friend and former coworker of mine, Frank Kimmel, a bemused sort of guy, once told me a somewhat-naughty joke he had heard about why so many non-Hoosiers are confused about Indiana: “It’s because South Bend is in the north, North Bend is in the south, and French Lick ain’t nothing like it sounds.” Neither my wife nor her parents — all Indiana-born and bred — had ever heard the joke.

Oh yes, the cats. Our outside cat, Guy, is being amply supplied by food and water dispensers in the basement where he also has a two-way portal to his beloved outdoors. Our two inside cats, Blackie and Nothing, have been set up with even bigger food and water dispensers for the nine days we will have been away, and those dispensers are loaded with at least a 30-day supply.

Their customary one litter box has been lined up with four others in the kitchen, all loaded with fresh litter that should go at least two weeks.

Cleaning them won’t take that long. It’ll just seem so.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is ‘Going and Coming,’ a painting by Norman Rockwell for a Saturday Evening Post magazine cover in 1947.