MONDAY, SEPT 29

MONDAY, SEPT 29:

    HOME!!  Dissolved in tears of relief & gratitude for the safe trip of over 11,000 miles (11,080 to be exact).

     Before we even got inside the house, 2 sets of neighbors – Jim & Mary Erkmann and Marty & Mary Jacobsen – came over to welcome us home.  What a wonderful neighborhood & community we live in!!

     When we were getting ready to leave this morning, we remarked how empty that lovely campground was – just a few stragglers like us.  How different it must have been just a few weeks ago – probably full every night.  Another very visible reminder of the changing of seasons and the inexorable march of time.  As we take things out of the RV and put them away until next year, it reminds me of taking down and putting away Christmas things every year.  Another marker of time.  As I get older, I find myself involuntarily wondering what changes will there be by this time next year?  What unanticipated joys?  What sorrows?  On our trip this year, my Aunt Joyce died.  My last aunt, and the one I knew the best, both as a child (I’d spent a week at her house each summer with my cousins Larry and then baby Scott, while cousin Cindy would come to our  house to stay with Lynn) and as an adult.  Not sure that I’ve absorbed the finality of it yet.  But I feel the knowing that it’s another link to my childhood and family now gone. 

     Enough melancholy!   Time to relish our spacious, clean house!  And to relish Missouri.  It’s not Washington or Oregon or Montana, but as we traversed south and east from western Iowa today, especially a while after Kansas City on I-70, it was so nice to see the transition from flat farmland to Missouri woodlands – more trees, occasional rocky bluffs, rolling hills.  We do live in a pretty state, and we’re coming up on the loveliest time of year here, which those Northwest states can’t rival.  We’ll enjoy the foliage of the woods in back of us  many mornings and afternoons and evenings from our deck.