At 7:15 AM I got up to go for a walk with my sister-in-law. She drove us to the starting point, a Starbucks in an unquaint strip of shops. Like all Starbucks it was a pleasant enough place to wait for her friend, with a sofa, mock wood counters, the smell of coffee beans.
It was cold, but not bitter. The three of us walked down paths alongside the highway, through neighborhoods that I was warned were hilly, but turned out to be merely gently sloped. Crows cawed at us from the branches of bare trees. The area was expensive — large houses all in huge lots, seen from a distance. There was a lake. Every now and then we would pass other women jogging down those paths all, like my companions, slender and in brightly colored parkas, sometimes with dogs galloping alongside them. We circled back around to the Starbucks and its sofa for lattes and gossip.
Highland Park is one of the most beautiful of Chicago bedroom communities, affluent, landscaped, an architect’s playground, with “important” houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Pam Troy 