One Thing: Traveling Home

What is it about the road? I have always loved it. It is beautiful to be in between leaving and arriving. All the trees call out in bloom, standing on either side of the long, long road. We drove back from Koh Chang and it took two days and a morning. 

When we drive we listen to podcasts and audio books (on this trip we listened to A Short History of Nearly Everything, a big ol' science book by Bill Bryson) and we pause and talk and talk about them. The kids love this. I love it. Chinua loves it. And so time passes as we listen to our favorites (This American Life, of course, and TED Radio Hour and Tim Keller and Radiolab.) 

And there is tussling and fighting. And sometimes the teen in the car goes crazy a bit because everything is so loud and people are so annoying. And one time, after eleven hours of travel and a mistake where we drove twenty minutes in the wrong direction and my neck was hurting, it was me who went crazy. And it's always time to stop and eat. But how I love being in this space together, all of us in one place, in a car that moves from here to there. Because I know, as we drive, that we will get there eventually. And when we do, we'll break apart from this cluster and there will be more space between us, in our rooms. One of us in the kitchen, one in the bedroom, one off on a bike ride. It's beautiful in its own way, but so is the road, and being together.