I’m fortunate that my mom still lives in my childhood home. So going to visit mom feels like “going home”. I frequently call both my home with M and my childhood home,”Home”.
It’s wild because I remember a time when I did not consider this house home. I wrote - a lot - about the idea of Home, what it will feel like when I find it. I still capitalize it when I write of it as a concept.
It’s good to be Home.
The flight was not bad. It didn’t seem to last too long, I was only starting to get antsy upon descent. It was particularly turbulent, especially as we landed. I definitely had intrusive thoughts about the plane crashing.
I met mom and my sister at the airport and we went back to my sister’s. I gave her the boots M offered and the glass mushrooms I made for her. She immediately tried on the boots and stuck the mushrooms in a plant pot, it looked cute :)
We hung around until dinner time, chatting at the kitchen table. After dinner my sister and I went for a walk with the dogs. By that point it was 8pm and I thought it a good idea to go to my aunt’s house (where mom and I were sleeping), so we could have a visit instead of just going to sleep, since we’d be out the door early in the morning.
It was a long weekend, so there’d be a lot of cottage traffic, so I had intended on leaving at 6am to beat it.
My sister asked if we could do 7, 6 was too early.
So naturally we got on the road at 8.
Traffic was heavy but we still did the 2h drive in 2h15m.
I spent the day reading, and waiting until after dinner when my friends were coming over.
The Odd Couple, Bird Guy and his wife, and an old mutual friend I never see came out with his long term girlfriend (15 years). I wonder why I feel like that need quantifying. He and I dated in high school, but I spent hours of my teens watching him and Bird Guy skate, so I’m going to call him Skater Phil.
When The Odd Couple arrived, just ahead of the others, I gave Odd Fellow the stained glass woman I made him. He was SO excited. It was really gratifying to see how much he loved it. He thanked me repeatedly through the evening, asking me questions about its making. It’s the kind of reaction you really want for an object you made specifically for someone.
The 7 of us hung out outside for a few hours, somehow avoiding the mosquitoes. I also hung out with Odd Fellow as he split some firewood (Hot), and we chatted before rejoining the group. Mostly they talked about an ice storm that hit our town quite hard last winter. It wasn’t exactly a topic I could join in. After a while Odd Fellow went down to start a fire. So I went down with him. Bird Guy told me later he was going to come chat with us, but decided Odd Fellow and I deserved some alone time. I told him that he needn’t done that.
Eventually Bird Guy and his wife had to leave (they live the furthest away) and everyone came down to the fire. At this point Skater Phil and I managed to catch up on his life, which has been spectacularly shitty since his mom died earlier this year. Unfortunately the mosquitoes came out in full force, even biting our asses through the chairs we were sitting on. We headed inside, where we continued to talk until 11:15. Considering I was still on my home time zone, it was LATE and we’re old.
It is so nice to still be connected with these people. Odd Lady is basically my BFF though we text sporadically and have catch up calls slightly more than rarely. Odd Fellow is just one of the sweetest men I know, and it doesn’t matter how long it goes between us talking or texting, he’s always thoughtful with me. Bird Guy and I have so much history, and we text almost every day, definitely every weekend. The fact that without fail we will get together every time I come home, it just gives me life.
This morning I slept in, in my childhood room. It’s weird to sleep in a room I designed as a teen, with deep purple walls and curtains, and Chinese characters on the wall as art. Before people knew better.
We had breakfast, and were just settling into sitting around (I was reading, my sister was working, mom was prepping to make apricot jam), when our late neighbours daughter (a senior herself) came over for a visit while her parent’s home was staging an Open House. She and my sister talked primarily at first, but eventually she turned her attention to me. She asked, “What does the Life of Ms Fury look like”? And I don’t know how, or rather due to some very therapeutic and probing questions and zero filter from me, we talked extensively of what it is like to work for the military as a non-conformist (and how miserable I am). I always forget that about myself, that I’m a non-conformist. Because I’m just me, I just happen to be… contrary.
Eventually she got called back to her parent’s property, and we thought our day was going to start, except she came back and we all talked for another 2 hours.
My sister wanted to take the dogs on a more involved walk, so once we extricated ourselves from our neighbour’s daughter, we left for a trail in a nearby community. The loop itself was supposed to be just over 2km, and it might have been, had whoever groomed the trail last not stopped more than 3/4 of the way around the loop. We immediately got lost, and because we stopped to check the map on my phone, the mosquitoes absolutely attacked us. We crashed through the bush, trying to find our way back to a path, or back to the road. It took us maybe 15 minutes of bushwhacking before we found the road. Except there was a fence up, and there’s no way we could have gotten the dogs over it. So we started bushwhacking along the fence, and fortunately it didn’t take long before another gate with a gap big enough for us all to get through. By this point my head was pounding, I was sweating my guts out, and we quite possibly were covered in poison ivy. Verdict is still out on that, but we did soap and scrub ourselves pretty thoroughly when we got home. I soaped my shoes, even. And threw our clothes in the wash.
I was so grateful that I grabbed gatorade right before our walk, because I’d over-hydrated and had a few dizzy spells, so I knew I needed electrolytes. I DEFINITELY needed it after that abomination of a walk. Even my sister drank some.
This evening has been chill. I settled in to read after dinner, and immediately heard from both M and Bird Guy that they were “high af”. I remembered that I wanted to buy a 510 cartridge that M had bought when he was here for testing. I really liked it, but it was unavailable in our province. So I asked my sister if she wanted to go into town, and when she said no, I asked Odd Lady, who said, yes, except she wasn’t in town and wouldn’t be for a while. So I drove to the store by myself, bought 2 cartridges and a new battery, and came home and got high myself.
It’s been a good visit so far.
Tomorrow I see Oldest Bestest at her mom’s, which will be awesome. And then probably I’ll be helping mom with her septic tank, so that’s going to suck. I might see Odd Lady tomorrow evening.
Loading comments...