We spent close to 18 hours in the car last week, driving from Maine to Pennsylvania and back again just three days later. My grandfather passed away on the 3rd, quietly and peacefully, and so we joined my family in my hometown to celebrate him and say good-bye. I’m beyond thankful we were able to visit back in February, and that my girls had the chance to be with him and love him.

All of that travel time allowed for far more quiet time and reflection than I’m usually afforded, particularly on the way home. I didn’t have the chance to pack any handwork before we left, and reading too much makes me carsick, so I was left to watch the scenery and simmer in my own thoughts – some of which are really too private to share here, and some of which bewildered me so completely in their randomness and simplicity.

It’s sort of an odd experience to be back among most of your family as an adult, and as a parent. To be in a house where you were a child, with all of the people who knew you as a child, and be treated as an adult. It’s not that I was expecting to be considered badly, but in reviewing the trip, it does stand out as a new experience. And to watch my children explore and come to know a home I explored and knew as a child – as familiar to me as my own home – was not exactly surreal, but notable. My daughters sat on the front porch with their second cousins and played with a marble machine their parents had clustered around close to thirty years before. I snuggled my girls on the glider and told them about the bee tree, and how you could lean on the trunk of the tree next to it and look up to watch the bees moving in and out. I showed them where the swimming pool was before the land was sold and houses were built, the pool where I learned to swim. I laughed with my brother and cousins when the little ones rang the doorbell over and over, and we reminisced about the way we’d run around and around the house, ringing the doorbells, over and over. Remarkable.

Also. My own house feels really sparse. I know my grandparents had 60 years to build a home, but I think it’s time to hang some curtains in our place, at the very least. 

Also. I really enjoyed being clean. That seems like such a shallow takeaway from a life-changing event like this. But suburbia doesn’t have the ever-present dust of living in the country, and I certainly wasn’t stepping in chicken poop at my Nana’s. I didn’t need to scrub my feet at night, because I wasn’t walking through mud or gravel to get to the car. I wasn’t cooking or cleaning, and my clothes weren’t spotted and stained. In fact, it was nice to get dressed – to wear heels and do my hair, to feel put together. I don’t usually bother here at home because it doesn’t seem worth the effort (who am I trying to impress?), and I don’t often have backup around so that I can take the time – but perhaps it is something I should explore more often. Perhaps that’s just the kind of self-care I need to invest in.