THINGS I DID AND DIDN'T DO

Nine days is a long time. Over those nine days, I did not check email. I looked at Facebook for a minute while we were in Bryce Canyon City and had a moment with Wifi. I did not exercise. I did not do yoga, even though I took my mat. I did not stress about the amount of green things I was not eating or the amount of junk food I was eating. I did not read the news. I did not write in my journal. I did not take as many pictures as I thought I would, but the ones I did take are good ones. I still need to process the pictures I took with my Nikon. I do not have words for describing any of the landscape that I saw. I do have a list of animals that we saw. We collected forty seven license tags; this includes Hawaii.

I cried the first time I used my Gold Star Family National Park Pass.

Michael told the Park Ranger that this was the first time using the pass and we had questions. The Park Ranger went from business to empathetic in a snap. She said all of the things I didn’t want to hear. Then she warned us that some people may not know what a Gold Star Family member is and that we will have to explain it to them. After that first time, nothing was ever said about it again. At one National Park, the Park Ranger mistook the pass for the Fifth Grader pass and we did not correct her. But that first time….that first time took the breath from my lungs and I sobbed all the way to the visitor’s center.

I had a vision of pictures of me standing at the Grand Canyon in my pink tulle skirt and J’s combat boots at sunset. I changed in the parking lot and crammed my right foot into a boot and laced it up. Then I reached for the left boot and discovered that it was a different boot. It was also a righty. When Katrina sent me the boots, I barely looked at them before shoving them into my closet because that is what I do with things that poke at my heart. I thought for a second that maybe I could just put the right boot on my left foot and no one would notice and then Michael suggested an alternative plan. It was a good plan and I am more than pleased with the images that came from all of that.

I left Chris with canyon views in both Arizona and Utah. I did not take any of Dad, but he was with us in spirit on our second day of travel when the tire blew on the truck and then Michael ran over tire debri that ripped out our shower drain pipe and water line. We never use the shower any way and the water line is an easy fix. For the first time in my life, I camped in Colorado without a fishing pole. I sat on the banks of the Colorado River without ever casting a line. I ate my trout in restaurants. On the last day, I soaked in pools of hot springs and floated on my back in the mineral water. I thought about what I would write about this trip and I came up with very little. There were parts of this trip that stung me in unexpected ways. There were moments when I was so awestruck with the landscape, I could not hold a camera. I have not known what day it is since June 9th, when I left for Camp Wildling. I never had time to adjust before heading out on this trip and now that I am home, I am resisting an adjustment to days of the week and times of day.

In fact, I am not even supposed to be at work today. I put the wrong dates in the work calendar and no one expected me back until Wednesday. So, I’m sitting here with my second cup of coffee, scrolling through thousands of emails and getting myself halfway organized for the rest of the week. And that is all I have planned for today.