Home, again

Last night at this time I was driving east on I-90, Kyanne next to me in the front seat, kiddos sleeping (or nearly sleeping) in back. We’d stopped for the last time in Ellensburg for Chinese food and a bathroom break, and as we hit the road on that final stretch, the sky pinkened over the mountains and cast a lovely, soft light over the hills. It is my favorite time of day to drive through beautiful country.

One week ago at this time we were all heading east, the sun setting in the rearview mirror as we drew closer to Bozeman. When we rolled into the driveway, crunching over the gravel, my dad was sitting on the front step waiting for us. I stepped out of the car, stretched my legs, and breathed the most beautiful air in the world.

This evening, I stood outside one of my favorite places in Seattle, waiting for Matt and the kids to come and pick me up. They’d dropped me off for a little alone-time while they looked at camping gear. The air was warm and smelled nothing like the mountain air I breathed in yesterday morning; instead it was a combination of coffee, food from the cafe next door, and the faintly marine scent from Puget Sound not far away. People milled around me, relaxed. I clutched the book I’d just bought, a memoir by the writer who’s leading my workshop this summer, and thought about where I’ve been in the last couple of days, about how I left one mountain state for another, and how both places are so deeply home, something I’ve written about again and again.

I talk about going home, and I mean it both ways.

Leaving Montana is always hard for me. I used to choke up a little as I drove out of town, even when I felt homesick for my little house right up the street from the Sound. It’s not that I don’t love where I am now. In fact, I still remember returning to Washington after Christmas during my very first year of teaching; I remember the feeling of coming home to a land of wet and green Januaries and feeling like I belonged here. I still feel that. Matt drove us across the West Seattle bridge tonight and I felt the same thing. I watched the soft evening light settle over the water, and I thought, I love this city. But a piece of me is planted in another state, too. Sometimes I wonder if my children, who are Washingtonians by birth, will feel that in their blood.

It was a beautiful week. Kyanne was a fabulous road trip partner and I found myself wondering how we’ve been friends for a decade without experiencing this until now. We took the kids to the splash park, made our own solo trek to the Lewis and Clark Caverns with a side trip to the Heritage Headwaters Museum in Three Forks, checked out the Farmer’s Market, drank a lot of coffee, hiked to a waterfall, watched some pretty spectacular fireworks, and saw some even more spectacular sunsets. Not a bad way to kick of July. Kyanne weathered lots of hours in the car with two children who were not her own, and she didn’t seem too ruffled when they became overtired and whiny and unreasonable. Instead, she took pictures of them when they were a.) adorable or b.) asleep.

Strangely, I think one of my favorite memories of the trip is one that doesn’t have much to do with the mountains or the sunsets or the sweet, sweet mountain air. On the Fourth of July, my parents’ neighbors invited us to a barbecue in their backyard. Matt and I went a couple of years ago, when Isaac was just a baby. They have a little girl just about Suzannah’s age, so we thought that might be fun, and Suzannah remembered that. This year we arrived to several kids tearing around the yard, playing in a large inflatable pool and jumping on a trampoline (with a safety net. Every house but ours had a trampoline when I lived there, it seemed, and none of them had safety nets and someone was always nearly breaking their neck on them, but now people surround them with these nets and therefore I didn’t mind if my children were allowed to jump with abandon).

“Do your kids have bathing suits?” our hostess asked.

My kids had spent the afternoon in bathing suits already as we’d recently returned from the splash park. I briefly thought about walking them back over to Grandpa and Grandma’s house and wrestling them into their cold, damp suits -- and quickly decided that they could just get their shorts and t-shirts wet, if they wanted. I stripped off Isaac’s t-shirt and he spent the next three hours tearing around the lawn, throwing himself in and out of the pool. A couple of the older boys, experienced big brothers, played with him good-naturedly. Suzannah went nuts on the trampoline. The kids set up a sprinkler underneath, so they jumped in squishy, wet, delighted joy. I sat on a lawn chair, munching my mom’s fruit pizza, and watched my kiddos run around like wild things, so unselfconsciously themselves, so in the moment, and I thought, this is everything wonderful about summer.

Later, we wandered over to another neighbor’s house for a fireworks show that rivaled the one at the fairgrounds. It began with a free-for-all with the kids; they shot off a bunch of those parachute things, followed by about a half an hour of unlimited sparklers. Then things got real. The only thing missing was the accompanying radio program, and afterwards we only had to walk back across the street. This is Montana, people.

I will not write about how my son screamed, “I don’t wanna go inside!” as I carried him across the street, or about how he refused to put on his pajamas and thrashed around on the floor, bare-bottomed and wailing and just done until absurd o’clock that night. I sat with him on the floor in my parents’ bedroom, speaking quietly, waiting him out, reminding myself that in a few days I would be able to hand him off to his father and be all, “You take this one for awhile!” Eventually, he turned to me pitifully and said, “Where my jammies?” He allowed me to put them on, and then he crawled grumpily into bed.

And it’s funny, isn’t it -- how in the moment, I was frazzled and exhausted and wanted to howl right along with him, but a few days later I think of that moment with something resembling tenderness, both for my overstimulated little son and for my desperate mama self. And I love that moment, that snapshot. This is the absurdity of parenthood -- that we look back on those moments that take us to the edge of our sanity, and we fall even deeper in love with the fierce and funny little people who threaten to push us over.