The Complicated Love of Home

We visited Suzannah for Fall Family Weekend, and it was wonderful. It's only been a month, but I have missed her so much. I'm still not used to walking past her empty (and strangely tidy) room. I'm not used to not hugging her every day, or before bed. Hugging her again -- she gives great hugs -- was my favorite part of the weekend.

"You're doing great," I whispered as I hugged her good-bye last Sunday. 

"I'm doing okay," she replied.

And I told her that one month into her first year of college, especially considering everything she's fought through to arrive at this place, okay is more than enough. When I think about the last couple of years, those terrible post-Covid years layered with additional trauma -- some of which I recognized and some of which I didn't at the time -- my gratitude for what we have now brings me to my knees. We did the best we could with what we knew at the time, and some of it was good enough and some of it wasn't but it brought us to this moment, where my firstborn baby adult wants to spend time with us, where she checks in every day, where she misses our hugs and can't wait to come home.

I'll take that. Every time.

*

I've written about home a lot, both in this space and in many others. It's a loaded word for me. I was born into senseless privilege, really; my childhood bedroom still exists in pretty much the same state I left it an entire adulthood ago. I have always loved the way my parents' house in Bozeman smells when I walk through the door, even decades after I left. I love everything about it: the sound of the creek through the open window in my old bedroom (where my children now sleep when we visit), the light over the kitchen sink at night, the sound of the water singing through the pipes when the shower starts, the way I still know where to reach for cereal or crackers or peanut butter. The deer that strut across the lawn at twilight. The shadows that spill over the Hyalite foothills.

I didn't interrogate this privilege for a long time. I've always had a home base: somewhere to return to. And I took it entirely for granted.

*

How many homes can a person have?

I have never once regretted moving to Washington. I've lived here for my entire adult life; we've chosen to raise our family here, and I can't imagine choosing to leave. I have the water and the mountains, and a short drive to the plains I still love as well. I have creative autonomy in my professional life that I absolutely do not take for granted these days. And I live in a state where basic human rights still -- mostly, for now -- remain protected. As a woman and as a mother of a fabulously queer kid and as a human being, this matters.

I love my home state and I always will; it's in my blood. But I also understand that I'm an outsider now. I understood that the day someone from my hometown posted a picture of a car with an out-of-state license place just...driving down Main Street. The message was clear: You're not wanted.

It was a running joke when I lived there in the 90s: No Californians! 

The license plate was from a state in the Midwest, though, not California. And I understand that this isn't a joke.

I have an out-of-state license plate and I have since 2001. 

Is this a silly thing to pick on? Maybe. But this person happened to post this picture the same summer Ijeoma Oluo -- a writer I think we should all be reading -- faced an intense wave of racist vitriol (death threats, rape threats, vile names I will not type here) when she dared to make the comment "Will they let my Black ass walk out of here?" after visiting a Cracker Barrel in Montana during a road trip with her children. (I've never eaten at a Cracker Barrel, but I do know they had to pay...a lot, for racially discriminatory practices.)

Which brings me to the conversation I had with a student last week.

*

My juniors were working through one of James Baldwin's essays, and I was walking around the room begging them to please just fall in love with the texture and cadence of his perfectly brilliant sentences. They were doing their best to derail my teaching, as teenagers do. But sometimes the derailing leads to conversations that take us where we need to go anyway.

"Winslow, what's your favorite place in the world to visit?" 

I was tempted to ask this child what in the world that had to do with the work she wasn't doing, but it was Friday, and I like her a lot, and I didn't really feel like working either. 

"Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park," I said. "This has been true for my whole life. If I could only ever go one place again, it would be the shore of that lake. Or swimming in it."

"Where is that exactly?"

"That's in Montana, where I grew up. I love some places in Washington just as much now, so this isn't a fair question, but that's always my first answer."

"I'm not about to set foot in Montana," she said. And she explained in no uncertain terms why.

*

The first time someone I worked with told me about the time they were met with unabashed racism at a restaurant while traveling through my home state, my first response was something along the lines of, "I'm so sorry that happened! That's not Montana!" As a white person in America, I was taught to believe that racism was a reflection of horrible individuals. Horrible individuals are everywhere! An unfortunate reality that doesn't ask anything of us. Because we are not like that.

It's exactly the response I saw from well-meaning Montanans in response to Ijeoma Oluo's experience. How desperately we want to prove we're not like that. 

I responded in more or less the same way the second time a friend told me a similar story. A different town, a different circumstance -- but the same story I didn't really want to hear. I wanted to believe in the friendliness and hospitality of my home state. And I do believe in the friendliness, hospitality, and goodwill of individuals in my home state. But it took me some time (the time I had the privilege of taking) to understand that my response -- I'm sorry you encountered terrible people, but that was a reflection of individuals, not a systemic issue -- is exactly how white supremacy sustains itself, how it grows and flourishes, even in our homes, even in our well-meaning hearts.

I remember the first time a student asked me, "Are there any Black people in Montana?" and it led to a conversation similar to the one I had with my student last week. She understood the call towards home; she felt it too, towards a home she hadn't visited in a long time. But she also wondered, rightly so, how I could love a place that wouldn't welcome her too.

I don't love Montana any less than I did the day I left at eighteen, and the day I left for good when I moved to Washington twenty-three years ago. Sometimes I think that the grand sum of my writing, all of it, has always been a love letter to home, whatever that means. It means it's complicated, like any love. It means I think a great deal about home. How privileged I am to have been raised where I was, to love it freely and to feel welcome while I lived there. How privileged I still am to be able to return when I want, to hope my children understand that while they are Washingtonians through and through, Montana and Minnesota pulse through them as well; their roots are deep in all those places. How privileged I am to claim these roots, and to be able to return.

*

Suzannah was always fairly certain she wanted to attend college in-state, though she considered a few Oregon schools; she was quite firm on this from the beginning. She never wanted to go to a red state, for what (I would hope) are obvious reasons. But also, she doesn't want to be too cold or too hot, so no weeks of subzero or intensely hot weather. 

"The Pacific Northwest it is, then," I said happily. Because what parent wants her kid to go far away? She had plenty of excellent options and I trusted her to choose what was right for her. But when we visited Western the summer before her senior year, I had a feeling.

Mostly, I want her to know our home will always be home, regardless of where she chooses to put down other roots. I hope it always feels like it.

*

My kid voted in her first election last weekend. Her ballot was delivered to our address, and we took it to her for Family Weekend. After we'd had lunch and made our Target run, we hunkered down in a cafe I've grown to love over the past year. Rain streamed down the windows; Mazzy Star played inside while Suzannah and I sipped coffees in a cozy booth. I wrote in my journal and she spent a long time with her ballot. I've drilled into my children to an irritating degree that local elections matter a great deal; if I've done my job, neither of them will ever say, "I'm not political" or "I'm not into politics," which is, of course, a political statement in itself. 

*

I can't see myself living in Montana again; I don't think there's a place for me or my family there anymore. But Montana runs through me, and I still love it fiercely. I love my family there with my whole heart. It's complicated, and it's not. 

I've donated to Jon Tester's senate campaign more than once because I still have this wild hope that that a dirt farmer who works the same farm in north-central Montana near my family's farm in north-central Montana (who still uses the same meat grinder that took three of his fingers in an accident when he was only nine) can hang on to the senate seat he's held for so many years in a deep red state, even though he is a Democrat, which is something of a miracle. I've donated because even though Washington is my home now, my heart still claims Montana too, even if it won't claim me back. Because even though Tester and I part ways on some issues, he represents more wild hope that there might still be space for people like me and my family in the place that raised me, even if it's not actually me and my family. Because he works the same land his grandfather homesteaded, because he was a teacher, because he has a gay son, because if I want to ever believe that there is a place for my family in any capacity then I have to believe that some folks in unlikely places will still fight for basic safety and dignity for everyone. Because his opponent is absolutely repugnant and you don't need the news to tell you that; you can hear it straight from the candidate's own mouth. I've donated because people contain multitudes and even though Tester has never been on the ballot with Trump before, which will do him no favors this time, I have to believe it is possible that safety and dignity and decency and empathy can win, even against the odds.

I'm not sure donating to a senate campaign in a state I don't live and can't vote in counts as local politics, but it feels personal.

*

In the meantime, here we are. We're a mess. But also, even when we're a mess, our daily lives are still so full of beauty and love and I hope to never take a second of that for granted, even as I sit with the understanding that I have, in this beautiful life of mine, taken so much for granted.

In the meantime, here I sit, thinking of home. Of the people I love in every home I've ever known. Of all the ways a human heart can break and mend. Of my daughter's hugs and how I miss them, of how lucky I am to know she misses them too. Of the way my son can make me laugh on the darkest days of the year. Of my students and everything they've taught me. Of the friends I've lost and the friends I count as family. Of everything we stand to lose. Of privilege and shortcomings and shortsightedness, of trying to be better, of giving grace, of accountability. Of not knowing where to start, but clumsily trying.

Everything a heart can hold

I think this is the longest I've ever gone without writing here in over a decade. I've written my stories in other places this summer...

...but I'm back now. It feels like time: the first real weekend I've had since school started. Has it only been two weeks? Was it only two weeks ago that we took the light rail to Seattle and the ferry to Bainbridge Island on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend? Was it only two weeks ago that we swam in Colman Pool at the edge of Puget Sound in West Seattle? That seems like another season already. We always say summer passes too quickly, but as a teacher, I'm always ready to go back to school, ready for the structure, for the natural rhythm of the seasons.

Our summer travels seem like they happened so long ago. Less than a week after we returned home from Minnesota, we drove to Montana to spend a few days in Bozeman and then headed for Glacier National Park. For the past several summers, this has been essential: I don't care what else we do as long as my heart can return to its roots and I can breathe the air south of Bozeman, or at a campsite in Apgar. These are the places that feed my soul and bring it home.

I wrote in my journal all summer, trying to capture the "hard kernels of memory" one of my best college professors spoke about on our May Seminar in Europe the summer I fell in love with Matt. I have a journal full of those. These are my hard kernels of memory from Montana:

5 p.m. Back at Zocalo, post swim. Kids with my mom, Matt at a brewery he wanted to check out. The sky darkened while we swam but only now decided to release spatters of rain. These sudden summer storms never show up in the weather forecast, it seems, but I love them. Thunder and lightning are muted in the Pacific Northwest--the thunder doesn't shake, lightning doesn't split the sky.

I bought Tin Man, Poems Across the Big Sky II, and Lowell Jaeger's latest collection: Earth-Blood and Starshine.

Now the rain pounds the streets. It's the sweetest music. The door to the coffee shop is open, the air steamy.

*

We visited my grandmother yesterday. She is significantly more frail than she was last time I saw her, but when she hugged me good-bye she gripped me tight. She had a plate of half-eaten pizza next to her chair and accepted one of my mother's cookies. Drank two cups of coffee. When one of her young caregivers stopped by to check on her she beamed, even though when he asked her how she was feeling she said, "Lousy, like always." But this is not a woman who will slip away this week, even though I know she has just wanted to go and be with Jesus since I don't know how long ago. Feels like half my life or more.

But I still don't think I'll see her again in this life.

"You'll always be my precious," she said into my ear -- she's said these words to me for my entire life. "I love you so much."

*

Leaving Bozeman is easier when we're heading to Glacier. Cold Smoke coffee on the way out of town. Lunch at MacKenzie River Pizza in Missoula, a stop at Rosauer's in Kalispell. Pulling into the park past 6:30. Run down to the lake. Breathe deeply. I miss the air as much as anything. Dinner at Eddie's: Huckleberry Reisling and trout almondine. Back to the KOA for the night -- tucked the kids into bunks and sat out under the porch light, drinking beer with my husband and reading A Gentleman in Moscow. Thursday: Up early to secure a campsite. I walked into Apgar while Matt set up camp, ordered a coffee and a hot water for the fancy instant oatmeal with turmeric and coconut. I scooped the steaming spoonfuls at a table just outside the Cedar Tree.

We made sandwiches at the campsite, skipped the long line for the shuttle to Logan Pass, and drove the Going-to-the-Sun road. Hot sun over snow on the trail to the Hidden Lake overlook -- Matt and Zannah went all the way, but Isaac and I turned back, slipping over the slush on the way down, sliding snowballs down the backs of each other's shirts, shrieking and laughing.

Spotted: moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats. No bears this time. (My dad found bear scat in their yard not long ago. I said, "I want to see a bear this trip." He said, "Well, then, slather yourself with honey and wait.")

Lake McDonald was colder this year after such massive snow-melt, but I swam anyway. Until I was too numb to keep swimming. Dinner at the campsite: hot dogs, potato salad, baked beans, S'mores, Huckleberry Honey Ale. And then my sleeping pad deflated in the night. I don't know if that woke me or if my stomach did. I was violently sick in the camp bathroom, hoping I didn't wake anyone even as I could hear a man snoring raucously somewhere out in the darkness. I couldn't sleep after that, feeling every rock on the ground, but I felt better in the morning. I ate one of Matt's pancakes and sipped coffee, slowly. After hiking John's Lake Loop we played in the lake all afternoon, renting kayaks and a paddle board. I tried to nap in our tent after my night of fractured sleep, but the trapped afternoon heat turned it into a sauna. I found refuge in the lake instead, and slept much more peacefully the second night.

The rest of the summer was exactly what I wanted: afternoons spent in my backyard while my kids rode bikes or played with the hose or the Slip 'n Slide. I read books on the patio and sipped iced tea. We slathered ourselves with sunscreen and spent hours at the splash park. We grilled salmon and sweet corn and ate outside. I've never craved travel during the summer months; unless we're driving to Montana, I want to stay exactly where we are. I love the way time slows down. I love the languid afternoons. I love noticing the way the water catches the light as the sprinkler rises over the lawn and my son kicks through the arc of water as he pumps his legs on our backyard swingset. My children whine about being bored and I say, "This is a privilege of childhood. Figure it out. No, you may not play on the iPad." They play board games until they're screaming at each other. They bike to the elementary school playground. They play in the water. (When I am cranky, it almost always works to put me in water.) My children grow tall and tan.

*

I went back to school early this year. When I discovered that my carpets had been shampooed the first week in August, I couldn't resist the urge to spend a sweaty afternoon setting up and cleaning several weeks before my students returned. I scrubbed desks and touched up walls I wasn't technically allowed to paint in the first place, but since our old, moldy school that's literally sinking into its foundations will be torn down and rebuilt in the next three years no one has bothered to scold me. And despite the mold, and the relentless ant problem, and the uneven sidewalks and the old carpets that never really get clean no matter how many times they're shampooed, I love my classroom so much. It's home, too. The kids spent hours with me there in August, as they do every year. They expect this; they are Teacher's Kids. They know their way around my high school in summer. They know the dark hallways and damp carpets. They see the chaos of registration when they hunker down in the corner of the cafeteria with their books and movies and games.

I do better when I can reclaim my space and spend some quiet hours planning there before the frenetic last week of August. Especially this year. My heart was thoroughly battered last June for reasons I can't even write about here, and on top of that the class of 2018 had the nerve to up and graduate and leave me after I taught them all for at least two years. I said to Carol, the IB Diploma Program coordinator/person who actually keeps our school running and who is essentially my mom at school, "I'm quitting this stupid job. I'm going to apply at COSTCO this summer. I need a job that I don't have to emotionally invest in. Teaching just ruins my life." I probably stomped my foot, too. She didn't even look up from what she was doing; she just flapped her hand at me and said, "You'd make a job at Costco emotionally demanding too, so you might as well just stay here."

So I'm back. And it's home.

*

My grandmother died the week before school started, early in the morning on a day I was helping to lead professional development for our school and our two feeder middle schools. I learned about it as I was getting ready to head out the door. I was expecting it; even so, I went back into the bathroom and cried quietly, so I didn't wake my sleeping family. Within the hour I was standing in front of a crowd of teachers with a microphone, trying to compartmentalize and, I think, mostly succeeding. I took a few breaks to walk around campus alone, blinking back tears. I couldn't even articulate what I was feeling. Families are complicated, and I have a lot of complicated feelings. But in the end, love transcends that.

My grandpa died ten years ago; four years before that, I heard his voice for the last time before his vocal chords were removed, the result of throat cancer. Your fingerprints are all over my life, I wrote to him. It occurs to me that this is true for my grandmother as well.

The parallels are eerie; my grandfather died over Labor Day weekend. My grandmother died almost exactly ten years later, within two days. Both times, I taught my first classes of the year for three days before hopping a late-night flight to Great Falls, in time to make a Saturday morning funeral. One week ago, I drove home from school, threw clothes into a suitcase, and went for a jog to clear my head. Soaked in a lavender-scented bath. Went out for dinner with my family. They dropped me off at the airport and somehow I'd checked my luggage and made it through security in ten minutes. I spent an hour sipping a glass of wine and reading a novel before boarding a late-night flight to Montana, where I slept for four hours in a hotel near the airport. In the morning, my brother and sister and nephew and mother piled into one car, and I drove with my dad through quiet morning on a road I've known since birth. We saw antelope in the fields along the Chester road. I wrote this when Suzannah was just over a year old, when we drove north to visit my grandparents:

There really is no sky like the Montana sky, even in other wide-open states. I can't explain it. The drive between Fort Benton and Chester is like breathing deeply for the first time -- your lungs expand and fill with air you didn't know you could hold.

"Wow," Matt kept saying. "This is just...huge." But it's really a struggle to find a word to attach to it. The evening sun lit the fields against the distant Highwood Mountains. We braked for pheasants, for a new spotted fawn. I lost track of time, my age, of what car I was even driving. I just kept breathing, clinging to the thought that at least some things never really change.

My grandmother was buried next to my grandfather. I'd last seen my grandfather alive in August that year, kissed his bruised arms and scrawled notes on the little pad he kept with him before driving west on highway 2 into the late summer heat. By the time I returned for his funeral a few weeks later, the weather had turned; clouds gathered over the Bears Paw mountains and rain spattered the roads. The sky at the gravesite last weekend was hazy, the air hot and slightly smoky. All of August, we've choked on smoke from wildfires as we continue to incinerate our planet.

But when I stepped out of the car with my dad at the church in Gildford, the first thing I did was take a breath: I could still smell the scent of harvest on the hi-line. And that smell, woven into my very DNA, is home.

And now I'm back in Washington, doing what I do, taking my kids to school and Tae Kwon Do and soccer. Zannah is in jazz band. She's almost as tall as I am. The kids compete in their first Tae Kwon Do tournament next month. Life rolls on. My 2018 seniors visit; I get to have lunch with them, or they burst into my classroom before they head to college. And my heart bursts in some way basically all day long, every day. This is life. This is the life I am senselessly privileged to have.

Tonight I'm home with my family. We let the kids stay up too late on Fridays, but Friday is Family Movie Night on normal school weeks. We put on pajamas as soon as we can, and we eat fun things (either takeout or whatever looks good and easy at Trader Joe's), and we watch something, who even cares what, and everyone is silly, and we fall asleep knowing that tomorrow we have a soccer game but we do not have to set an alarm, and we'll have time to make pancakes and Matt and I will sip extra cups of coffee, hoping to read on the couch but knowing the kids will fill up the house with their noise.

Here's a thing I think I am sort of good at, at this point in my life: noticing and appreciating moments that fill me with peace, even if they are not peaceful moments. Like the sound of my kids practicing their Tae Kwon Do on an ordinary afternoon. Like my daughter's trumpet practice, or the sight of my son reading in his room, the way he still tucks his feet under his bum while he hunches over his book. Like the view of the mountains in Montana, the familiar dip in a road I haven't traveled in years. The way the landscape changes as I see it from the airplane, even though I am an anxious flyer: from the sheared golden stubble in the square fields that give way to wilder landscapes, the rivers that wind through the prairies and then the mountains. Last weekend I was somehow bumped into first class for the short flight between Great Falls and Seattle, and I sipped wine from a real glass and started a new book. I looked out the window at the landscape of my life, at the prairie, the rivers, the mountains. And I could breathe.

Let us all breathe

Labor Day Weekend. Here we are. This is September: it is hot, but temperatures that would leave me limp and miserable in July are bearable now, in this transition between summer and fall. And right now, where I live, I am safe from both hurricanes and fires. Watching the updates of evacuations in Montana is heartbreaking. This afternoon I took my son to a local splash park and watched him play with so many other neighborhood kids, and the sunshine was delicious, and I love these days in which I watch my children just fully immerse themselves in summer childhood: sunscreen, water, new friends made in the moment. And yet, I'm praying for an end to the days of sunshine and heat, and praying for rain. The photographs of Sperry Chalet burning in Glacier Park bring literal tears to my eyes. The places we spent some of our very best days this summer are closed off, evacuated, burning. Please, God, send all the rain to Montana. Bring an early snow. Let my home state breathe again.

*

Here in my other home, the home of my choosing rather than the home of my birth, shadows slide across the sidewalk, long at dinnertime. The sun begins its business of setting early enough to cool the evening air, no matter how hot the afternoon sun. Yesterday morning I rose hours before dawn to drive my parents to the airport, and the dark of four o'clock had a pleasant chill; when I slipped back into bed at five-thirty, I pressed my cold feet against my warm husband and thought, blearily, that soon I will wrap a blanket around my body to ward off the night's chill. And I found pleasure in that thought before I drifted back to sleep.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm ready for September and everything it brings with it. The world keeps turning. Sometimes this feels like an atrocity and sometimes it feels like a comfort.

*

Like every teacher, each June I am desperate for summer. But every August, I am ready to go back. This year, I was ready early; the morning after we flew in from our last trip of the summer, I was back at work. That was weeks ago. I've been at school or at trainings every day since then, with the exception of Friday when I stayed home to paint the hallway bathroom. My children have logged a lot of hours at school with me as we set up my classroom, and they've spent many hours with their babysitter as well while I've been at trainings and professional development and a high-energy union meeting that made me immensely proud to teach exactly where I do. And while some of the early mornings have felt a little rough after the freedom to not be perfectly put together for awhile, the last few weeks have felt good. I couldn't wait to get back into my classroom. The kids helped me scrub the desks, move them together, and assemble supply boxes for each table group. They watched movies on their little DVD player in the computer lab while I sat at my desk and mapped out new curriculum. We watched the solar eclipse outside the library during senior registration, and there was no place I'd rather have been; I watched unfamiliar shadows fall across a deeply familiar place, felt the temperature drop, and soaked in the delighted reactions of my own children and the teenagers sharing eclipse glasses. I settled into this deep, late-summer contentedness in that room. Last week I found myself still there at nearly 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, and I'd settled into such a comfortable groove of productivity in my quiet space that I was reluctant to leave.

It was a good summer, but it was too full; all summer I didn't have two consecutive weekends at home, and I'm so ready to settle back into my routine, my own space. I'm ready to sleep in my own bed and have some measure of control of what I eat, where I go, when I want to go somewhere, what I drive. I already feel protective of next summer. I want the slower weeks, the languid afternoons. I want my kids to cope with boredom, and I don't want to spend each week planning the next trip. I hate for this to sound like a complaint, because it's such a privileged problem to have, and each trip was objectively good, but by the time we returned home in mid-August I was so desperately grateful to just be home. Our cozy house, our backyard. Our summer traditions: swimming in Lake Washington at Madison Beach and eating pizza afterwards, eating lunch outside every day, spending mornings at the playground and afternoons at the splash park, grilling dinner outside.

This weekend I'm trying to balance the last lovely moments of true summer with steady productivity, which keeps my anxiety at bay. Somewhat. Part of it is the normal anticipation of school, the return of the back-to-school dreams, and the frantic hope that my children will be happy and okay in their new classes. My daughter starts middle school, and my son is alone at the elementary school now. Three of us in three different schools will take a little juggling, and I'm eager to find our groove.

This morning I read something I wrote in a journal six years ago, when my daughter was starting kindergarten and I was getting ready to teach new classes. I could have written nearly the same thing today. That soothed me a little.

Facebook also reminds me that three years ago, instead of settling in for an early bedtime before the first day with my students, we tossed toothbrushes and a stuffed puppy in a backpack and rushed our little son to Mary Bridge Children's, where we spent a few anxious days.

Every place my mind lands brings a different sort of perspective: the wider world, and our closer one. Hurricanes, fires. Anxious nights in the ER and the way the world can narrow to the confines of the walls of a hospital room.

The world churns on, and much about the churning world feeds my anxiety, too. I'm anxious about the fact that the entire western half of my home state is on fire and this goes largely overlooked. I'm anxious for my students this year and what Trump's horror of a presidency continues to mean for them. I'm anxious over any number of things I can't control. Maybe this is why I was so eager to return to school this year; I know it's dangerous to focus too much on outcomes when we work so hard against forces we can't control. We might not be able to change the big picture, and certainly not by ourselves, but I believe strongly in the power of doing what we can, where we are. I don't know how else I can continue just breathing in and out.

Home is what the air smells like

There are times on the road where I don't want to talk, don't want to listen to the radio or an audiobook, don't need anything but the way the highway hums under the tires and the prairie touches the mountains, the way the mountains touch the sky. Kalispell to St. Regis, driving along the Clark Fork River. Bozeman to the Lewis and Clark Caverns, the drive where, in summer, Montana shows us her best self. Great Falls to Chester, where the road dips under the dome of sky and pheasants scatter across the highway. Havre to East Glacier, where the plains reach to the Rockies.

These are the landscapes of my heart.

I drove some of these roads this week while my family napped or read. These are the roads straight to my heart. The roads home.

Every time I return to Montana, I think about what home means. Because home, too, is where I sit tonight: in this house where I've raised my children, who are Washingtonians. We live in the Pacific Northwest, and I've learned to write love letters to blackberries and salmon and the smell of salty air. Maybe home is what the air smells like.

Yesterday morning, I woke to birds singing and the scent of mountain air: the best air anywhere in the world. The cool breeze blew through our tent. My daughter was already awake; I turned over and buried my face in my pillow, hoping she wouldn't notice me and insist we all get up. Isaac slumbered on. My kids sleep so soundly when we camp, and so do I. It's the air, the quiet, the breeze through the mountains. This is the first year in five that we haven't been rained on at least once, I think. Rain never bothers me. Falling asleep in a warm and dry tent with rain pattering (or pounding, we've had that too) on the roof is one of the deepest pleasures of summer.

The kids and I walked through the campground yesterday morning and into Apgar Village. We ate breakfast with my parents while Matt packed up our campsite. I bought a coffee for the road, and I drove us out of the park. We drove to St. Regis, snacked on free popcorn at the travel plaza, watched the rainbow trout swimming in their giant tank. I drove on to Coeur d'Alene, sipping huckleberry soda as we made our way over Lookout Pass. We ate a late lunch at MacKenzie River Pizza. Matt took the wheel then, and I napped until we hit a traffic jam: I-90 was closed due to a brush fire at Vantage. We crawled along in the early evening heat until we crossed over the Columbia River. We could see where the fire jumped across the road; the posts under the guard rails were still burning. By the time we made it to a diner the kids were hungry and hot. The folks at the restaurant graciously sat us five minutes before closing, and the kids ate ravenously while the servers stacked chairs around us.

"Thank you, thank you. So much," I said. "I'm sorry if we're keeping you here later."

"It's really okay! Enjoy!" they said. We must have looked more exhausted and desperate than I realized.

We rolled into our driveway about four hours after I'd thought we would. The house smelled so good to me. The kids brushed their teeth and crashed into bed; I unpacked the suitcases and started a load of laundry. Even as a young girl, I stayed up late into the night unpacking after a road trip, unable to sleep until I'd put everything away. When I finally crawled into bed last night, I knew I'd sleep well.

"I can't believe we started this day in a tent," I said to Matt as he curled sleepily around me. "And now we're back and the kids have swimming lessons in eight hours."

One month ago we spent the weekend at Great Wolf Lodge for Suzannah's birthday celebration. We stopped at a brewery on the way home, and that afternoon Suzannah and I got matching pedicures. Mine still looks pretty good, though hers has been thoroughly battered. Three weeks ago Suzannah and I had a girls' day out in Seattle, her birthday gift from me: lunch and book shopping. Two weeks ago I wrapped up my sixteenth year of teaching and began making plans for my seventeenth.

I spent a week lounging in my backyard, reading and drinking iced tea and watching my children run through the sprinkler.

One week and one day ago we descended into the Lewis and Clark Caverns and ate popcorn from my dad's 46-year-old popcorn popper. A week ago today I had coffee with my favorite high school teacher, ate Pickle Barrel sandwiches in the park and splashed in the same pool I splashed in when my family first moved to Bozeman twenty-five years ago. Six days ago Matt and I hiked to Emerald Lake; five days ago we had a date night at the places in my hometown that have become uniquely ours. Four days ago we picnicked with my parents in Missoula and dined on trout in Apgar for dinner; three days ago we all hiked to Avalanche Lake, the first hike Matt and I took together the summer we started dating and Matt boarded a Greyhound bus to visit me for a few days. Two days ago I watched a mountain goat flop down to cool itself in a patch of snow at Logan Pass. I watched my children paddle kayaks around Lake McDonald and I swam through that clear blue water, the mountains rising just beyond. One day ago I greeted the dawn in a tent. Last night I drove through the dark of another mountain pass and wound up back at home, tucking my children into their own beds. This morning we hauled ourselves out of bed and went to swimming lessons, went to the store. I ran loads of laundry. I checked my e-mail.

Life rolls on.

Sometimes when I go back to Montana I feel like I'm taking a tour of my whole life, that I'm every age I've ever been. But returning to the life I've built here, between the mountains and the ocean, feels exactly right. It's the way the air smells here, too: the evergreens and saltwater, and the smell of home after ten days on the road.

Just to be present

A few weeks ago I was incredibly privileged to attend the IB of the Americas Conference in Toronto. On one hand, it was a trip to Toronto, a city I've never seen, and that was fabulous, but also, there is just something purely magical about meeting people from all over North and South America, people who teach in so many different contexts but with whom I share so much common ground. I attended one of the best workshops of my professional life. I attended energizing and inspiring breakout sessions. Every evening I found my brain churning, and at one point I flopped down on a poolside lounge chair next to my boss and found myself talking a million miles a minute, feeling totally overwhelmed but also very determined and excited. I took many, many pages of notes. I made lists. I couldn't shut up.

I also spent a day walking around with my DP (Diploma Programme) Coordinator, visiting independent bookstores and feeling the pulse of the city around us. I carved out time for myself each day, which I didn't do last year and which I realized is important for this introvert's sanity. In the late afternoon, after the workshops and breakout sessions and before dinner, I hunkered down in the corner of the hotel bar (and once I claimed one of those poolside lounge chairs for two hours alone) and sipped pinot gris and wrote and wrote, just processing. I read a novel. I went swimming a couple of times. Twice I rose at dawn and jogged a couple of sweaty miles in the damp morning air, just to move, to clear my head before a long day. These little acts of self-care soothed the edges of my typical travel anxiety and possibly made me a more pleasant travel companion. ("You've actually done really well this time!" my principal said on the final flight home.)

My mom flew out to stay with the kids while I was away, which also helped a great deal with my travel anxiety; I didn't worry about them at all. She sent pictures of them shooting off rockets with their uncle and baking cookies at our place. Later, Matt sent me a text explaining just how many cookies we actually had: "Your mom doesn't play." (When I arrived at home, my mom said, "And don't try to give any away to Aaron and Morgan. I left cookies with them, too.")

Before I left for Toronto we'd been having a fairly cool summer. Comfortable, mostly, but not quite hot enough to enjoy the hours in the backyard or at the spray park that I so crave. Since I've been back, though, we've had stretches of hot, sunny afternoons that call us outside to slather ourselves in sunscreen and play in the sprinkler. This week, it's been too hot to walk to the park, even; well, possibly the kids would have been fine, but I usually jog a few miles around the little track while they ride their bikes or play on the merry-go-round or "big toy" on the playground and that appeals to me in no way right now. We've been spending our mornings in swimming lessons, our afternoons in the backyard. Once we drove to Seattle with Morgan and her sister to go to the Elliott Bay Book Company. Once we had lunch with Kyanne in Tacoma. Today we took our friend and pastoral intern to lunch before meeting another old friend at the spray park. Two nights ago we picked up dinner and headed to a local park that features live music every week; we met one of Suzannah's new friends from swimming lessons and played with our kids on the playground and I fell in love with my community again. The park was full, and parking was scarce. Kids were everywhere. But everyone was relaxed and friendly, and my kids played with kids they didn't know, and I chatted with mothers and fathers I didn't know, and I thought about all of our different contexts and how we still managed to share this moment with our kids on the merry-go-round and how that matters to me, a lot. There are a lot of reasons I choose to stay exactly where I am when I'm reading editorials in the local paper about how our city is "going downhill" because it doesn't look like the city people remember from a few decades ago, and the people on this playground don't look anything like the people writing those editorials, but I didn't live here a few decades ago and I do live here now, and this is my home and my community. And I unapologetically love it.

So here we are, at the end of July, and it feels so different than last summer. Last summer was by no means terrible, but I went from a deep sadness (losing my beloved pug, worrying about losing one of my best friends when he moved to a different job) to bouncing from Montana to home to Chicago to home to Minnesota to home and right back into planning professional development. By August tenth I was back at school every day, without having had the stretches of summer to just...be present in my life. This summer, I've had more time at home, which is what I need and crave. A year later, the friendship I worried would change has deepened in a way that means everything to me. I have time to process what I've learned before I step on another airplane. I can let it be okay to spend afternoons in the backyard, watching my children aim the sprinkler at the swings or the slide and create their own version of a waterpark at four o'clock in the afternoon while I pour a glass of iced green tea and read on the patio.

Next week, my kids will attend VBS and I will divide that morning time between writing and meeting with colleagues; there is so much work to be done before school starts. And it's good work. It will be all the better because I've had the time to slow down and breathe in the smell of water and grass and sunshine in my backyard on these July afternoons. The week after that, we will load up our CR-V and head to Bozeman for a few days before driving to Glacier National Park. I tell people that if I could only visit one place again in my entire life, it would be Glacier. We'll pitch a tent and curl around each other under the night sky, breathing the sweetest pine-scented air in the world. We'll hike to the Hidden Lake Overlook and swim in Lake McDonald and eat huckleberry ice cream. Even me, probably, even though ice cream upsets my stomach because I can't do dairy anymore. We'll buy T-shirts at the Cedar Tree and grill hot dogs and make S'mores at our campsite. This is becoming our family tradition now, and every year, despite the fact that I am sleeping on the ground and the four of us are sharing a pretty close space, my heart and my head feel at home and at rest. The nights spent in our tent underneath the Montana sky are peaceful in a way that no other experience can replicate; I am present in the drumming of rain (I'd say we've been rained on overnight at least fifty percent of the nights we've slept in that tent over the past few summers) and in the hush of the breeze through the skinny evergreens and the way the dusk settles over the lake.

This is what I want from summer: to be present in this moment without dreading the next.

Where I am and where I’ve been

Sometimes summer days are like this: without a clear agenda, my anxiety begins to simmer sometime around mid-morning. I’ve had a few cups of coffee, which is as necessary as air but also doesn’t exactly soothe me, and then the children are screaming at each other.

“Isaac! You stepped on it!”

“Zannah, give it back!”

“Mom! Isaac hit me!”

“Sorry!”

I mean they are just so all up in each other’s business, and yet they cannot bear to be separated for even five minutes. I try! Oh, I try. This morning before we did anything fun they were given the task of dismantling yesterday’s “spaceships” -- Suzannah’s took up the entire living room and Isaac’s took up the entire family room. They’d created dining rooms and escape pods and control areas out of blankets; they’d made their favorite stuffed animals fellow travelers; they’d basically unloaded their entire bedrooms into different parts of the house. Which was great. Yesterday afternoon I had a tour of both ships, and I didn’t even mind that they stayed intact for the rest of the evening. I passed out on the couch last night as soon as the kids were in bed, and I just did not have the energy to care that much. This morning, I told them that they would clean it all up before we went anywhere or did anything fun and figured that would keep them busy for awhile. Additionally, we picked up some containers at The Container Store yesterday, and since Suzannah loves organizing as much as I do, it seems, I figured she could use some quality time in her room quietly organizing the disaster on the floor into her new bins. She’s good at this. She likes this.

It just wasn’t that kind of day.

It wasn’t a bad day. The kids were just kids in summer. It’s just that the only other adult I spoke to today happened to work at the Honda dealership. And they’re so great there, usually, but I really wasn’t in the mood to hear, “Huh. Doesn’t your husband usually do this?”

Respectfully: Bite me.

Anyway, I decided not to go ahead with the mini-service that was apparently due today, because I didn’t want to deal with two kids, one car seat, one booster seat, and a loaner car. I didn’t want to have to come back. So that was an hour in the car for no reason. We went to the spray park instead. I read in the sunshine and watched my children leap through the water. I still hadn’t had any adult conversation, but I had a book, and the day -- like almost all summer days in the Pacific Northwest -- was nearly perfect. Blue skies. A breeze. My children in the water. Fresh cherries and blueberries waiting in my refrigerator, and also just maybe some Flathead Cherry beer brought back from Montana.

I sent my husband a text: Can you stop and get milk, toilet paper, and some sanity?

He responded: Do we need to cage the children in the backyard?

Later, he sent a text from the store: Getting groceries now. I replied, Okay! I’m drinking beer.

But he’s home now, and the children are watching a movie and we’re all bathed and I’m feeling pretty calm. Matt is grilling veggie burgers and baking fries and promising me a little alone time tomorrow, and I’m basking in this evening sun, in the scent of sunscreen and shampoo, in gratitude. Because even though I felt my nerves begin to sizzle before lunchtime, and even though the unstructured nature of summer days tends to make me anxious in a way the school year does not, I do love this season.

We’ve been on the road and I’ve been offline. It was a beautiful break. Not necessary a vacation, but a break -- virtually no social media, internet, or phone. Lots of sunshine. Tons of time in the water, which feeds my soul when I don’t have time to myself. (I was going to link to a hilarious article about going on a vacation vs. going on a trip, but when I went to google it I found ten more hilarious stories. Just go read a few. They’re great. Vacation vs. trip. Yes, google it, especially if you’re a parent.)

We spent the first half of our trip in Montana at my parents’ house, which included taking the kids swimming at the outdoor pool downtown, Pickle Barrel sandwiches and huckleberry soda (obviously), a visit to the Museum of the Rockies, floating the Madison River, taking a 12-mile hike (that was just Matt and me), meeting my favorite high school teacher-turned-friend for coffee (a must-do on every trip home), visiting my grandmother, and eating popcorn from my dad’s famous 45-year-old popcorn popper. We spent the second half of our trip in Glacier National Park, which is my favorite place in the entire universe. As in, when I was hugely pregnant with Isaac and preparing for labor at a birth center with no drugs, my “happy place” in my mind was the shore of Lake McDonald in Apgar. Which is where we spent two full days last week. In the “happy place” version (which existed in my mind only), I was sitting at the shore gazing at the mountains, or possibly swimming by myself. In the “reality” version captured on film last week, my daughter was paddling a kayak all over the place by herself. And then she tried paddle boarding. By her damn self. It was both hard on me and totally heart-exploding in the best of ways.

Anyway, it was all wonderful. We spent the first two nights in a cabin with two bedrooms, which meant we could tuck the children in and then sit up with the lights on, read books, and drink fancy gin for ten minutes before I was all, “Well, I’m exhausted." I was absolutely giddy with it. The second two nights we camped, and that was lovely in the way that camping with our little family always it. It rained hard overnight, both nights, and I tell you what, there is honestly nothing better than curling around my children in the warmth of our tent with the rain drumming over our heads, knowing we are warm and dry and that our rain fly is indeed going to hold over the peaceful space beneath.

We also had the extraordinary privilege this time of spending a few days with my aunt and uncle and cousins and their partners and children, which has happened exactly never since Isaac was born. I think the last time I saw both of my cousins together, Suzannah was about five weeks old; needless to say, a lot of life has happened since then. Watching my kids play with their second cousins was, again, totally heart-exploding, and reconnecting with my first cousins was exactly what I hoped it would be. I’ve spent a little time with them both over the years, mostly separately, for graduations and funerals and the odd dinner, and I’ve always come away thinking, you know, I really like these people and I wish we could hang out. This trip gave us a little of that time, and I feel more determined to nurture these relationships through our adulthood. That’s a good place to be with family.

We’re home again, settling into whatever normal means during the summer months: play dates with friends, trips to the spray park, letting the sunshine slide over us in the backyard or while we hunker down inside with books or endless games of Uno, special lunch outings when I’m tired of making sandwiches and want fancier things in my salads. We go to the library. We go to the zoo. Sometimes I force my children to just be bored and figure out what to do about it; I refuse to over-schedule their summer days with activities and I also refuse to turn on the television, even though I was mightily tempted at ten-thirty this morning. We nibble fresh blueberries and Rainier cherries, maybe crackers and cheese in the late afternoons. I read terrifying articles about “the big one” sure to hit Seattle. I inform my husband that we need to put together emergency preparedness kits. (I am absolutely serious about this.) I read novels. I fret. I run the sprinkler in the backyard. I pour iced tea into tumblers. I breathe in, I breathe out.

In a few days I’m flying to Chicago for the IB of Americas conference. It is a huge, huge privilege to attend and I am so grateful for the opportunity. I’m also freaking out about it a little bit, because that is what I do. My husband cannot ease all of my fears but he can reassure me that he will vacuum the house before I come home again, and that small gesture speaks volumes. This man knows me and puts up with me and seems to love me even when I’m crazy.

I’ve been missing my dog, a lot. Still.

I’ve been reading excellent, challenging books.

I painted our master bathroom, finally.

I’ve slathered my children in sunscreen and turned them loose in the bright hot afternoons.

I’m getting tan.

I’m struggling with changes that have infused my first half of summer with unexpected melancholy.

I’m still grateful for the friendships that mean so much to me.

And I’m still excited for this upcoming year. I’m in no hurry for August, though, not just yet. So for now, despite my anxiety, despite the tough summer mornings in which my children can’t get out of each other’s faces, despite my attempts (sometimes successful, sometimes not) to shake it all off and just relax already, I’m content to just let these days flow over us. Like water, like sunshine.

These small moments

The thing about forming deep attachments to people is that they don’t always last. Or rather, the attachment might, but relationships change and fade away. This is the natural order of things. People grow up, move away, move on -- it happens. This is the rhythm of the universe. But sometimes, the relationships hold even as they change, and years later, you might find yourself gifted with a spectacularly beautiful day in which you spend time with people who meant so much to you years and years ago, and it feels, also, like the natural order of things.

Today felt like a gift. As a teacher myself I know how powerful and intense student/teacher relationships can be, and I also understand that despite their intensity, many of them -- most of them, really -- fade over time. People remember many of their teachers fondly (I hope) but they don’t necessarily stay connected. But I’m thirty-five years old, and still. Still! One of the people I always want to see when I go home is one of the best high school teachers I ever had (I spoke about her in the interview, thirteen years ago, that landed me the teaching job I still have today), and so we remain connected, years later. I love Becky, and I love her daughters, who I babysat for a couple of summers after I graduated. They were younger than my own children are now when I spent my days with them. They were candelighters at my wedding. And now they’re adults, twenty and twenty-three years old. I had coffee with their mother last week in Bozeman, as I always try to do when I’m there, and she mentioned that she and the girls were heading to Seattle for a few days this week.

And that is how I wound up spending the day with them today. We met at the Woodland Park Zoo, and I brought Matt and the kids, and it was just delightful beyond words. I couldn’t believe how much they remember about the time we spent together -- they were so young! -- but I love that they do, because they were such a defining part of my summer days for awhile. I took them everywhere with me. I remember giving them piggy-back rides around downtown Bozeman, driving them in the backseat of my new car, taking them to ice cream, to the park, to the pool. When Matt and I took our children swimming at Bogart Park in Bozeman less than two weeks ago, I told him about taking these girls there, too. They really felt like family more than babysitting charges; I brought them out to my parents’ house all the time, and when we took my grandmother out for lunch on our way to Bozeman on our recent trip she asked about them because she remembers them, too.

“You trusted me so much,” I said to Becky today. “I just kind of took them everywhere I went.”

She shrugged. “I knew you,” she said.

Today I watched these two young women interact with each other in this beautifully sisterly way, still so different from each other, still so completely fabulous. I watched them play with my own children, which burst my heart in the very best way. And I thought about how strange time is, how these two little girls have become adults while I still feel so much like my eighteen-year-old self sometimes, how they have their own lives now, and how utterly lucky I am to be able to share this day with them. I think about how much their mother has meant to me for over half my life now. I think about the moment today at lunch when my two little children were both tugging on their arms, and I don’t even know what to call that, really. I could only smile and say, This is so great.

***
I didn’t forget about writing down three positive things each day for seven days; in fact, I scrawled them in a notebook on our trip, but I decided not to work to hard to post while we were on vacation. The internet break felt really, really healthy and necessary. But! I’m back now, so here are twelve good things.

Huckleberry riesling and huckleberry ice cream. Swimming in Lake McDonald, the way the cold water closed over my head when I finally worked up the nerve to plunge in, the view of the mountains when I resurfaced. Field roast and baked beans cooked over the fire. Falling asleep in our tent, curled around our children. Walking to Apgar Village in the cool dawn because Matt needed breakfast supplies, buying a hot chocolate, and returning to our campsite for pancakes and French press coffee. Driving across northern Montana, taking the wheel on the Chester road -- maybe one of my favorite quiet stretches of highway -- while my family dozed. The sunsets east of Shelby and just south of Great Falls. The first shower after camping. Showing my children the house I lived in when I was their age, driving them past my elementary school, my middle school. MacKenzie River Pizza (twice) and Leaf & Bean coffee (a bunch of times). Pickle Barrel sandwiches and huckleberry soda in the park. Swimming at Bogart in the afternoon heat and in the rain. Hiking to Emerald Lake and Heather Lake and Grotto Falls. Losing my sunglasses, and finding them again next to a rock where I’d stopped to rest and adjust my boots. Running along the highway with a view of the Bridger mountains. My dad’s famous popcorn in his ancient popcorn popper. Date night at Over the Tapas: poached pear salad, goat cheese croquettes, grilled asparagus, and vegetable Wellingtons (which I told Matt were the best thing I’d ever tasted). The trout aquarium at the St. Regis travel center. Homemade huckleberry scones. A cute neighborhood pub in Coeur d’Alene. Watching my son break into a grin on the carousel at Riverfront Park in Spokane, especially after he thought it would be too scary. The way our house smells when we return to it after a vacation -- like home.

Is that more than twelve? I stopped counting. They are all small, simple things, but they are the things I remember most. The small things make me appreciate the big things: my family and this time we had together.

At our campsite at Glacier, Suzannah turned to me and said, “Four things made this a perfect day. First, we got to ride the shuttle to Logan Pass. Then, we had ice cream, and then we played in the lake, and then we had s’mores. When you get four things like that it’s a great day.” Later, as we enjoyed our dinner, she said, “Ahh. Milk and a fire. Perfect.” Indeed, this is how my children bless me every day. They remind me to be present, right here, in the simple joys of our lives. Perfection is found in these small moments: in ice cream, in jumping into a lake, in a chocolatey mouthful of dessert roasted over a fire.

Nothing good can come from too much reading.

A couple of years ago, we spent a day of our summer vacation at Yellowstone National Park with my parents. We hadn’t been there since Suzannah was a year old, and we thought the kids would enjoy Old Faithful. They did -- we have video footage of Suzannah exclaiming, “That is so cool! Whoa! I’m pretty sure that’s even taller than all the people!” (Isaac, not yet three, turned to us and said, “Water gone? Turned off?”)

Later, while the kids licked at ice cream cones, I wandered through the gift shop. I don’t really feel like a tourist when I go to Yellowstone or Glacier National Park because I spent so much time there growing up, but I still occasionally buy t-shirts, and sometimes I find great books tucked into the corners of these little shops. A few years ago, I bought a collection of poetry by Montana writers and it is still one of my absolute favorite poetry anthologies of all time; last summer, I found a book of poetry by one author featured in that book.

But when we found ourselves in Yellowstone two summers ago, I didn’t buy poetry. I sidled up to my husband, who was innocently tucking into his own ice cream cone, and said, “Will you buy me just one book?” He nodded, distracted, and so I got to take home Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park.

Death in Yellowstone is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: an account of the 300 deaths that have occurred inside Yellowstone National Park. The book is divided into two sections -- Death by Nature and Death by Man. I am not particularly concerned about Death by Man; I am unlikely to travel by wagon or stagecoach, and I’m just as likely to be killed by a drunk driver or murderer anywhere else.

I am smart enough not to try to pet the bison and grizzly bears.

I don’t eat plants while I’m hiking, even though I have learned (supposedly) once or twice which ones are “safe” and which ones are the kind that will twist up your insides in ten seconds before you drop dead right there on the trail. Look, I saw Into the Wild; I’ll just stick to my own snacks.

Death by lightning doesn’t worry me because while I worry a lot (just you wait) I can’t do much about a thunderstorm. I’ll enjoy it, actually, but I probably won’t be standing on top of a mountain while I do so.

I’m a strong swimmer. I always swim sober, and mostly in lakes (rather than rivers), so the little chapter on Death by Drowning didn’t keep me awake at night.

Death by falling actually worries me a lot, and it kind of makes me no fun to hike with sometimes, especially when we have the kids with us. There’s a really lovely hike we enjoy here in Washington -- I’m not going to tell you where it is because if you know it you’re definitely going to make fun of me -- and I can barely even get through it sometimes because it involves crossing a bridge (a fairly wide, wooden bridge with a substantial railing) and I am utterly convinced that one of our curious children will somehow scale the railing before we can grab them and fall into the water below. (It’s not that far below. If it were, I wouldn’t be walking over it, believe me.) Matt was not appropriately empathetic that first time, and there may have been some tension between us for the rest of the hike. It’s fine, though. Bygones.

My point is that there are really high places from which to fall in Yellowstone and I did not enjoy reading about them. I shared this with my husband, along with the rather strong opinion that we should avoid any place that boasts a spectacular view; nevermind the fact that I love a lot of those places. (I can’t believe I am confessing this publicly, but years ago when we went to Snoqualmie Falls I couldn’t bring myself to walk up the steps to the viewing area. I got close, but I seriously almost threw up when Matt thought he was going to carry our little daughter to see the waterfall. We can get a perfectly good view of the falls on the opening credits of Twin Peaks.)

The worst chapter, though, was the very first one: “Hold Fast to your Children: Deaths in Hot Water.” Just the title is bad news for a mother, especially one who spends so much time in Crazyland. Later that night, after we’d tucked our exhausted children into bed, I curled up in my parents’ living room with my new book. It wasn’t long before I sat up, horrified.

“Matt, do you know what happens to your eyeballs if you fall into one of those hot springs and get boiled alive? They turn white. Not just the part that’s already white. The whole thing.”

“Good grief, Shari,” my mother said. “Don’t you have anything nicer to read? What were you reading before you started reading this book?”

I showed her my copy of Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus.

“For Pete’s sake,” my mother said.

“I’m glad I got you that book after we walked around the hot springs,” Matt said.

“Well, we’re not going back until the kids are teenagers, obviously.” My what-if’s (what if one of my children broke away from me and stumbled and fell in? What if one of us turned our back long enough for one of them to try to touch the pretty water?) were quieted only by the knowledge that Isaac was solidly contained in either the stroller or the backpack the entire time, and Suzannah had a firm hold of someone’s hand all the time and was also well-behaved enough to listen when we told her seriously that it was important to stay with Mom and Dad and Grandpa and Grandma and not touch the water. Also, we were safely home again by the time I had to visualize someone boiling alive in the hot springs.

I’m not sure what prompted me to write all this tonight, except that soon we’ll be in Glacier for a few days during our annual Montana trip and I suppose I was feeling nostalgic. There are no hot springs in Glacier, although I have no doubt I’ll find something to be anxious about. Still, as far as I know, no one has written a book called Death in Glacier, and Matt probably wouldn’t let me have it anyway. (When Suzannah was about two, we spent a few days in the park with Matt’s family. At night, after everyone else had turned in, I stayed up late reading a book about grizzly bear attacks. I know I said that’s not a particular fear of mine -- it’s still not -- but the book gave me such chills that I half-expected a grizzly to come charging through the cozy living room of the house we were renting near Whitefish.) I don’t really know what to say about this. The other day Becca said to me, "I mean, horrifying documentaries about rabies and/or gangs and/or religious cults are how you relax.”

Okay, but seriously, I will try to be reasonable on this trip.

Relatedly, I’ve been mostly off Facebook -- all the grandparents have been here over the past week and we took a quick trip to the ocean -- and I plan to stay mostly off until we’re back in Washington. One of the things I appreciate about vacation is the permission I give myself to truly unplug and be present where I’m at. I’ll check my e-mail a few times, and I still might post here, because I love to tell everyone what I think all the time. Also, my friend Mandy recently tagged me in a challenge to post three positive things for seven days. This is a Facebook thing, but maybe I can do that here, and it’s a nice way to check in and capture the moments I want to remember from our trip. I won’t promise seven consecutive days -- I don’t plan to try to punch in a blog entry on my stupid smartphone somewhere in the mountains -- but I’ll shoot for seven days before I post on Facebook again.

Here are my three for today:

1. The light summer drizzle that greeted me when I stepped outside this morning. I love our sunny Seattle summers, but these moments of softness that make everything smell new again are a gift. The droplets shone on our pretty purple flowers in the front yard.

2. The pound of fresh roasted coffee from Valhalla, which I bought on a coffee outing with Suzannah and Kyanne. Have you ever physically just hugged a package of coffee because it smelled so good?

3. The freshest, lightest, loveliest dinner -- butter lettuce, roasted beets, cucumbers, kohlrabi, and roasted broccoli. Every single week I am grateful for such easy access to gorgeous local produce here. I love this season of salads, and I’m so looking forward to pluots and peaches in a couple of weeks.

I’m signing off to finish The Mill on the Floss, because while I do love a nice meaty Victorian novel in the summer, I’m not sure I want to pack along my hefty hardcover. I’m planning to bring a few paperbacks instead -- and who knows what kinds of books I’ll pick up along the road this year.

Settling into August

And then there comes a day when you take your children to a water park, and your daughter tells you she wants to go down one of the water slides -- one of the big water slides, let’s be clear -- and you are torn between heart-bursting pride and just the tiniest wish that she was a little more afraid of it. And finally, finally, you relent, and you climb the wet stairs to the top with her. It is so high up there. You can see the entire water park from the top of those slides. Your son is throwing himself down the little slide in the kid’s pool, wild with joy and totally confident that a grown-up will keep him from drowning should he hurl his little body into deeper water. Your husband and mother-in-law are standing guard; you are often glad that you married such a tall man, because he is easy to spot in a crowd. You can also see the surrounding neighborhoods, which seem so quiet on this hot afternoon in August. Everything is green -- the urban forest of Minneapolis and its suburbs. For a moment you are vaguely disoriented, caught between the peaceful surroundings spread out before you and the chaos right there in front of you.

And you’re about to watch your daughter go swirling down into the midst of all that.

She steps up to the top of the slide when her turn comes, and she turns attentively to the lifeguard, waiting for his signal, just like you’ve coached her. He nods impassively. She hesitates, just barely, just enough for you to notice, and the lifeguard says, “You can go.” And before you can blink she’s pushing herself off, and you watch from the top as your seven-year-old slides away, down and around and around. She doesn’t attempt to slow herself by bracing her legs against the side, the way she did so long ago on those slides at the playground. She’s sailing now, and at the very bottom she plugs her nose and you catch your breathe just a bit as she shoots into the pool, pushed completely under the water.

She emerges, dripping and triumphant, and swims towards the edge. And when she finally sees your smile she can’t contain her own.

When you ask her if she was a little nervous she says, “No, not at all!” and you remember the first day of first grade nearly a year ago when you asked her the same question and she gave you the very same answer.

This is your baby girl, your firstborn, your beautiful little fish.

***
Years ago, in college, when I traveled to Ireland, England, Wales, and France on a May Seminar, my professor talked about recording the “hard kernels of memory” from each place. Last night, I returned from a week-long trip to Minnesota with my own little family, and when I sat down to write tonight, the hard kernel of memory that came to mind was this: my little girl on that water slide. Which surprised me a bit, truth be told, because while our day at the water park was incredibly fun, I didn’t expect it to be such a moment. And yet -- and yet. The moments in which I am completely overcome by the spontaneous joy of parenting these two children of mine tend to hit me upside the head when I am least expecting it.

Of course there were other moments as well: watching the airplanes take off at sunset while we waited to board our own flight from Seattle, and hearing Isaac shriek, “Oh, look! A plane!” Tucking my children into bed with the Star Wars blankets their Grandma Cindy made for them. Running up a quiet highway in northern Minnesota one muggy morning, dense trees on either side of me. Waking at three, four, five o’clock in the morning to claw desperately at my mosquito-bitten feet. Playing board games with Matt’s cousins late into the night (or what feels like late into the night for me these days). Watching my daughter hug every single person there -- aunts and uncles and cousins -- before she would consent to going to bed. Isaac’s temper tantrum on a napless afternoon when he realized he didn’t have his Legos at the cabin and responded by throwing himself down on the grass and screaming about it. The lake, always the lake -- splashing at the water’s edge with Isaac, swimming out a little deeper with Suzannah, and the way it felt when I plunged in myself, the surface closing over my head like a cool curtain. (One evening, I went by myself shortly after a sudden rain sent us scattering inside after dinner, hurriedly gathering up the last of the plates. The clouds parted just a half hour later as the sun began to set across the water. I swam back and forth for forty-five minutes. The lake was perfectly still and reflected the orange light and pink clouds moving across the sky. I was completely alone; I could see the odd campfire through the trees on shore and heard distant bursts of laughter and conversation. Closer to me were the loons, swimming near the reeds. Their eerie cry, that sad crazy laugh, is one of my favorite things about the lakes in northern Minnesota. I swam until the sun dropped behind the trees, obscured by the last of the rain clouds, and the lake was glassy and dark.)

There were more moments back in the Twin Cities, after we packed up most of our belongings (there is always at least one forgotten t-shirt) and returned to Matt’s parents’ house -- making pizzas in the wood oven, experimenting with beets and goat cheese and trout. Walking to the local library in our swimsuits before the water park opened. My deep-in-the-gut panic when Suzannah threw up a couple of times 24 hours before we were scheduled to fly home, tapping into my deepest anxieties (flying, flying with a sick child, the fear of all of us finding ourselves similarly afflicted during the night; thankfully, she was fine the next morning, so we chalked it up to too much heat, humidity, activity, and greasy food for lunch that day). Watching my children tear around the play area at the airport and thanking God that such a thing exists, for our flight home was delayed a couple of hours. On the plus side, I had time to go have a glass of wine on my own and breathe a few quiet breaths first.

We’re home again now, settling into some kind of late-summer normal for a couple of weeks before back-to-school preparations begin in earnest. I spent most of July feeling a little desperate, which, I’ve learned, is what I do; it all moves so fast, these summer days, even when they’re filled with languid afternoons running through the sprinkler in our own backyard. But then we usually take our family vacation in early August, and by the time we return to our home in Washington, I am ready to make my peace with the end of summer.

This year, we returned from a long weekend in Glacier National Park (one of my oldest and truest friends was kind enough to get married there, my very favorite place in the world) a mere four days before our Minnesota trip. And that trip was wonderful as well, because I love weddings and because my parents were there too and because every time I visit Glacier I feel like I am visiting every self I’ve ever been, at every age. As soon as I breathe the air I start to hurt, because I know my time there has to end. I can’t explain it, really; it’s just so physical, so visceral. It is the most perfect place in the world. The shore of Lake McDonald brings me more peace than any other place I’ve ever been in my life, ever. We tried camping with the kids for the first time, and while I admit I approached this with a certain amount of anxiety, I can tell you that my hard kernel of memory for that first attempt was falling asleep in our new tent, a soft rain spattering the roof, knowing that we were all safe and warm and dry and everything important in the world was contained right there in that cozy little space. I hope I always remember how peaceful I felt in that moment.

So it was a lot of summer in that last week of July and in this first week of August, a lot of swimming in lakes, a lot of reconnecting with people from my past, a lot of deep breathing, a lot of gratitude. And that is what allows me, in some form, year after year, to settle into the golden afternoons of August. Vacations are behind us, and just enough of those lovely languid summer afternoons lie ahead. The light has already shifted. A month ago, my evening runs were hot and sunlit; tonight, the shadows stretched across the sidewalks. I’m beginning to make notes about lesson planning, the new books I’m going to teach soon. I’m filled with the earliest twinges of excitement instead of dread at the end of summer. It’s a cycle I know, and I’ve learned not to fight it. Summer is sweet because it doesn’t last forever.

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.

Jury Duty, Spring Break, and Loving the Ordinary

It’s the season for cherry blossoms scattering across the sidewalks, for running outside in a t-shirt, for falling in love (again) with the state I’ve grown to call home over the past decade. It’s also the season for dusting off this blog from its winter sleep, although I last updated in March. (Still, I’ve driven through a snowstorm since then.)

I’m supposed to be grading papers tonight. Grades are due on Friday or something, and we have conferences next week, and I have a large stack of senior essays awaiting feedback from my purple Pilot pen. (I prefer green, but I can’t find any of my green pens. I have about six purple pens floating around and so they will have to do, but I think the absence of green in my little red canvas pen pouch is inhibiting my ability to just get this done.) I hauled these essays to Montana with me last week and spent several hours grading them at my favorite coffee shop in my hometown, then spent a few more hours grading them at my parents’ dining room table after my kiddos were tucked into their beds, but after a day of that I decided not to let them have any more of my spring break.

So spring break is partly where I’ve been, and before that, it was jury duty, to which I reported rather cheerfully on a Monday morning a few weeks ago, not really believing I’d be chosen to serve on a trial but would spend a day or two sitting around and reading a book. Out of a couple hundred of us, what were the odds? But of course I was picked in the first group, and in that group, despite my valiant efforts, I found myself sitting in a jury box. Right in front. Juror #2. For two weeks.

The timing couldn’t have been worse, really. I had just spent two full weeks out of the classroom for senior IB orals, and I couldn’t even comprehend a month. I taught each class a grand total of two times between finishing orals and beginning jury duty. Still, when we were given the opportunity to explain why serving would present a hardship, the handful of people who were excused said things like, “I’m the only wage earner in my family, I have three kids, and if I don’t work for two weeks, we’ll have a tough time making rent.” I had to scramble a bit, and it certainly wasn’t ideal, but I know exactly how fortunate I am to have a job in which I still get paid for jury duty and don’t have to use any of my sick days.

And anyway, it’s a great experience. I was a little surprised at the amount of “advice” I received on getting out of jury duty. I’m going to go ahead and assume that most of it wasn’t serious -- at least I hope not, because I can’t imagine actually representing myself as a total whackadoo just to avoid it. Also, at the end of the trial, the judge thanked us and said, “We know it’s a great inconvenience for just about everybody to take this much time away from their lives, but if we only kept people for whom it was easy, we would only have one kind of juror.” A fair point. Also, I learned a lot. I honestly gained a tremendous amount of respect for both lawyers and judges. The courtroom proceedings were occasionally boring (mostly after lunch, which is a tough time of day for me to sit still and not speak or move -- yawn) but mostly fascinating. And it wasn’t lost on me that the twelve random people on this jury would be responsible for making decisions that would impact real people in real ways. When my students asked me if I’d do it again, I said yes, I absolutely would. It wasn’t always fun, but it felt important. And I found small ways to make the experience enjoyable, since it was outside my daily routine; to counter the afternoon chaos of driving to pick up Suzannah from my friend Bonnie’s house or Morgan’s work and switching cars at the transit center before dashing to pick up Isaac so late in the afternoon, I left a little early each morning -- early enough to walk to the coffee shop across from the courthouse and drink a hot chocolate as I watched the streets shake off their morning sleepiness. I read half of Midnight’s Children. I wrote a lot. I took some quiet, head-clearing, solitary walks. I had a nice long lunch break each day, much longer than what I get at school. All that, I will miss. (Sometimes it’s good to step just outside the boundaries of normal, everyday routine, and find the hidden graces there.)

Oh -- and I was the presiding juror. No one seems surprised by this, which, I guess, means I’m bossy. All I know is that no one else seemed to want it (which surprised me), and also, facilitating conversations is actually part of my job, and maybe I was missing that just a bit.

We finished up just in time for Easter weekend, a visit from my parents, and spring break. The day after Easter, the kids and I drove back to Montana with my parents and spent four blissful, relaxing days in Bozeman. April is generally not the most attractive time of year in my home state. When we spent spring break there five years ago, Suzannah built a snowman with her grandma in the backyard, and I went jogging through piles of slush on the roads. Three years ago, we drove to Montana for my grandmother’s eightieth birthday and encountered snow worthy of December. This time, we were blessed with sunshine and temperatures nearing seventy degrees, but the newly-melted snow left the grass matted and brown and the trees are still mostly bare.

And yet, as I breathed the sweet air of my home state as spring struggled upwards from that muddy ground, I understood that I was feeding my soul exactly what it needed. I unplugged. I didn’t read Facebook. I barely checked my e-mail. I ate my mom’s homemade muffins with gjetost in the mornings, I jogged up the highway towards town in a light spring rain, I drank the same coffee I loved when I was twenty-one years old. I spent a couple of hours with someone who changed my life sixteen years ago and who I love to this day. I spent a morning with my mom and the kids at the Museum of the Rockies and followed that with lunch at MacKenzie River Pizza. I ate my dad’s popcorn, made in his 44-year-old popcorn popper -- something I insist upon every time I go home. I had no real agenda. It was a perfect week.

Matt stayed home all week, not really feeling like he could take five days off right now, but he flew into Bozeman late on Friday night. On Saturday afternoon after brunch, the Winslows headed west once again, stopping overnight in Spokane. (We always drive straight to Bozeman from Seattle on the first leg of a trip; heading home, we like to relax.) A cozy dinner at a brewpub, an early night in a comfortable hotel, a leisurely brunch at Huckleberry Bistro before we hit I-90 once again -- it was a lovely end to the week and a nice transition back into teaching and some sort of normalcy, if that’s what you call it.

And even though I appreciate the occasional departures from the normalcy, from the routine -- the hot chocolate across from the courthouse, the solitary walks along unfamiliar streets, a temporary return to the home of my childhood -- it’s also pretty sweet to settle back into the life I live every day here and remember why I love that, too.

Home again, home again...

On Sunday night -- well, really, Monday morning, well after midnight -- I signed online, unable to settle into sleep. It's like that, at the end of a road trip. We'd tried to make the last day of our vacation an easy one, going as far as Spokane on Saturday night. Before we had children, we never would have considered splitting the drive from Bozeman to Seattle into two days, nor would we consider such a thing at the beginning of the trip, all anticipation and eagerness to put in as many miles as possible. But after nearly two weeks of travel, from Washington to Montana to Canada back to Montana, after a couple of colds, after a trip through Glacier National Park and a day in Yellowstone, we thought a nice hotel room halfway on the last day, in a city we enjoy, would be a nice way to stave off post-vacation blues and prevent total meltdown from one or more members of the family.

And it was great, really, a total luxury to sleep in on Saturday morning and then go for a four-mile run with a view of the mountains and then pack and then enjoy a nice lunch with my parents and then hit the road only to stop in time for dinner and a semi-reasonable bedtime. Suzannah snuggled into her bed in the hotel and fell asleep on her own. Isaac willingly went to bed in his pack-n-play (which is a Big Deal; he started the first few nights in bed with me, and my sweet son does love to snuggle but sleeps like a pinball, so if I was hoping for a cozy little temporary return to co-sleeping -- which I was -- I was in for a rude little surprise, plus some happily kicking feet right in the kidneys). Matt brought me a drink from the hotel bar, and we stretched out and read our books in the peace and quiet.

I'll just gloss over the part about how when we arrived at our hotel, after trying unsuccessfully to use our room key like a thousand times and then having it reprogrammed twice (or whatever they do with those dumb little cards) and then having some maintenance guy up to the room, we learned that the main reason none of us could get inside was that it was actually occupied already. We learned this because when the maintenance guy finally got into the room, a pissy voice called out, "Someone's in here, dude." So he called down to the front desk, and they insisted that the room was still assigned to us.

"Well, that's interesting," the maintenance guy said. "I wonder who's in there, then. Either they made a mistake, or someone scooted in there after housekeeping finished up and locked it. They do that sometimes. We've had guys try to make off with a coupla TV's." We were led to a new (unoccupied!) room and given vouchers for free breakfasts in the restaurant for our trouble.

We had all these ambitious ideas about heading out early the next day, but we lingered over our awesome free breakfast -- Matt really rocked the huckleberry pancakes -- and took the kids swimming in the pool so Suzannah could get just a little more mileage out of her new Spiderman kickboard. (She has come a long way in her swimming this summer, and this mama is proud. And Isaac just loves the water, loves to be tossed, loves to jump into it without bothering to look and see if we're actually ready to catch him. Little Dude will be in real swimming lessons next summer, for sure.) After we checked out of our hotel, we stopped for a quick visit to Riverfront Park because we cannot pass up the carousel. And as it turns out, we cannot pass up the Riverfront Rotary Fountain either, especially when it is at least two hundred degrees at noon.

We didn't leave Spokane until three o'clock in the afternoon. The kids, post-splashing and post-lunch (where there may or may not have been some overtired whining and one almost-tantrum) were passed out in the back before we'd finished filling the car with gas. Matt turned to me and said, "I'm just gonna drive until I need gas again, is that cool?"

Crazy weekend traffic just west of Ellensburg added probably an hour to our drive time, but Matt didn't stop until we were nearly home, and then only because we needed a few grocery essentials so we could at least get through breakfast the next morning. I didn't stretch my legs until I climbed out of the car in my own driveway.

I can't describe how much I love the smell of my house after we've been gone awhile. Every time we return from someplace -- not an afternoon away, but a real trip -- the smell of our house reminds me that coming home is awfully sweet.

That feeling lasts for about five minutes. Then the study fills up with luggage and the previously clear kitchen counter fills up with everything that was in the cooler and our snack bags, and I begin to despair about the state of the back seat of the car and its handfuls of crumbs. I am too tired to unpack, but no way can I leave the suitcases until morning, so somehow, in between getting the kids in the pajamas and putting together a late-night supper, I put all their clothes away and stash their suitcases. I unload the duffle bag with Isaac's blankies and Twilight Turtle and Suzannah's Twilight Ladybug and all the sunscreen and beach towels and extra diapers and Suzannah's kickboard. Somehow, I kept putting things away but the house still seemed to be strewn with stuff. So much stuff. (I have never, ever been able to go to sleep after a trip until I've unpacked at least most of everything and put it away.)

And then the blues set in. I wasn't quite ready to let go of this vacation -- I hadn't really felt quite ready to drive out of Montana the day before. I had a really gross sinus infection for a good part of this trip, but in almost every other important way it was a really healthy time for me. I stayed off Facebook entirely (good grief, I seriously need to do that more often) and only logged in to my e-mail three times in twelve days, because the thought of tons and tons of messages just piling up in my inbox made me a little nuts. I connected with people I love a lot, people I don't see often. I filled my lungs with the best air in the world, I dipped my toes in my favorite mountain lake, I went for solitary runs along quiet highways, I watched my children experience Old Faithful for the first time, I saw once again how loved and lucky we are, I had a long-overdue date night with my husband, I read good books. My cup was filled.

It's always a little strange, trying to settle back into normal. Especially late at night, with remnants of our trip sort of scattered all over the house, when I'm still feeling a slightly sticky layer of sunscreen on my skin, applied in a different city. When I've slept awkwardly against a car window and gotten a little carsick trying to read as we wound around over the pass.

So I was just sort of puttering around, unable to settle down and relax. I signed online, frittered around there for awhile. Glanced at the news. Learned that conditions were perfect for viewing a meteor shower after midnight.

I grabbed Matt's hand and said, "You have to come outside with me." And that's how we found ourselves lying on our backs on our rotting old (soon to be replaced) deck in the middle of the night, gazing up at the stars. Our neighborhood is quiet, but I could hear soft laughter from a few streets away; I wondered if people were out there with the same idea.

I tried not to think about spiders in my hair as my eyes adjusted to the night, and then I wondered why I don't spend more time lying on my back on my rotting old deck gazing up at the stars. It wasn't quite the same as appreciating the stars under a wide-open sky in the mountains of Montana, of course, but it was its own wonderful thing, framed by the outlines of the huge trees at the edges of our yard. And after a moment, I saw the first meteor, streaking across the inky sky.

We didn't stay outside long. We watched a handful of those meteors, those sudden little blazes of light, there and then gone. And then I sat up, rubbing my bare arms, kissed my husband, and went inside. Sometimes all it takes to beat the post-vacation blues is to notice something wonderful quite literally in my own backyard.