We Flew Home

On the day of my grandma's memorial service this summer I was back on the lane in the woods. Her ashes were 12 miles south, but we were celebrating her life with my family from Florida. Uncle Eric likes wild blackberries, especially over vanilla ice cream, so the boys and he and I scrounged around for cups and bug spray and headed up into the pines. I was wearing an eyelet skirt that just hit my knees, and not wanting to get scratched but lacking pants, I had dug my snow boots out of the closet and pulled them on. Running up the sunny lane and into the humidity of the forest, swatting at gnats, and disentangling myself from branches and briers, it wasn't long before my legs started to sweat. We found enough berries for dessert, and we talked in the stillness of the woods, the moss like sound-proofing insulation in a recording studio.

Isaac and Steven were shooting .22s nearby, so it got a bit hectic at one point, but such is life.

Such is life. That day, it was perfect. The night before I hadn't slept much, and I had to keep my sunglasses on to hide my tired eyes until the coffee, served by a friendly barista, worked its magic. And the people at the memorial service--it was a big church surrounded by sunflowers and we only filled up the first few pews--cried a little too, but we weren't there to cry. We were there to bring earthly closure on an eternal moment (you'll never succeed, but it does help something in your brain click).

After, it was just my family and the Prutsmans on a grassy rise above Troy standing around a columbarium in a sun-splotched clearing made of chiaroscuro. After, we went back to the farm, land my ancestors have lived on for a while. After, I was running up the mid-summer road in my snow boots, smiling.

I've been wearing those snow boots a lot this past week, clomping around the streets of Corning, visiting people and my old job, trying to stay warm. I think about that girl in those boots that one summer day when we acknowledged death and celebrated life and I want to be her every day. Then I realize, I am her. Italy bound some pages of my life together.

I still don't have the answer to why life is the way it is, but I have enough people to lean on and enough faith, that it's going to be okay.

I came home for Christmas. Spending the holidays with my family is literally what pushed me out the door of SBI and onto a plane, and then another plane, and then another plane. And then I was in the backseat of the SUV, my parents up front, trying to make conversation after 3 months of separation with a brain that had not slept in 42 hours. The first week was all hazy with jet lag and English and MPH and 12-hour clocks and doors that open out when going outside and dollars and catching up and people, lots of people. People in my life is a very good thing and I am thankful.

Now I have a sore throat and am craving humid, pine-saturated summer air to breathe. But it's the shortest, darkest day of the year and Christmas is just a few days away so it's supposed to be cold.

The holiday feels vapid though. Oh, America.

This year I'll just think of being with my whole family, and warmth, and scratched up arms from picking wild blackberries in the woods, and Jesus' life, and the stories of how he's in all our lives.

I think I'll wear my snow boots all day. You need good shoes to move on, and I'm moving on.