Traveling

Every summer we try to "go home." Living hours upon hours away from family has advantages, but we do try to make the pilgrimage each summer, and again sometime in the winter. It's sort of the deal we struck moving so far away. We grumble about it every time, and it's hard to spend time with family in such an intense way, seeing everyone in a short, compact amount of time, trying to make sure that everyone feels like they've had their fair share of us. Of course everyone wishes that there was more time, more days, more moments.

This summer, for a variety of reasons, we don't have anything on the calendar except a lot of times that won't work. In fact, we don't have any sort of non-work related travel on the calendar at all, until October. Perhaps that should change. It might help my outlook on the world, to know that there would be time away.

Returned

I have returned from vacation. I am a little tanner in the way that I become, which is to say not much. I have returned, a little bit rested, which is to say that I am rested from not thinking much about this life that I lead in this place, and exhausted from intensely being someplace else.
I have returned from the land of water and cold and hot and family -- a place that is written within me in ways I'm still discovering, and in ways that amaze me. How can I remember such intricate details of my past simply by driving on a road, hearing a bottle-rocket, seeing a fawn, stepping over mud, peeing in the woods?