BobRat

One month off the road

By Jill

Today marks our one-month anniversary of being home. Traveling, one month is an eternity of experience. It goes by quickly, but is filled with more amazing adventures than you can possible remember. At home, one month is a blink of an eye. It goes by quickly, and if you're lucky it's filled with one or two adventures worth remembering.

And so it is that we've passed our first month at home with just a handful of adventures instead of the lifetime's worth we were used to on the road: a new apartment, a couple of nice hikes, quiet moments with our sorely missed cat, a disastrous election. And so it is that we've hit the one month mark without adding pictures to the website (they're coming, I promise) and without sitting down together to capture memories and talk about what the trip meant to us.

After longing for "normal life," I'm now worried that normal life will swallow me whole, leaving behind my memories of the past four months. I’d forgotten how easily the mundane can distract you from the extraordinary.

Many people have asked us over the last month how it feels to be back in Seattle. The best word Eric and I could think of was "seamless." To be perfectly honest, it mostly feels like we'd never left. Certainly our life now doesn't look like it did before we left: it's fall instead of summer; we live in a different apartment and neighborhood; I'm not in school; and Eric spends his days writing rather than punching a clock. But life feels the same. It feels like we picked up exactly where we left off.

The problem is, I don't want our trip to feel like a temporary diversion, a hiccup in my continuing life in Seattle. So I'm challenging myself to find a way to fit the trip--its experiences and lessons--into normal life here at home.