The Highs and Lows of Going Back to Your Hometown with Your Mom for a Family Wedding

+that moment on the drive to Bend when you've fully gotten over Mt. Hood and the landscape changes as if by magic to the High Desert, which is so beautiful to me

+a three-hour lunch with my favorite high-school English teacher, who is 82 years old (fully twice my age) and is more alive than most people I know - we traded gossip about my old classmates and teachers, and she wanted to know about my life, and she told me A LOT about her life, and every single minute of it was wonderful. Absolutely the highlight of my weekend!

-hanging out with my mom and her friends, who spent most of their conversation complaining about how people treat them poorly (while also acknowledging that they don’t ever say “no” or set boundaries), kids these days spend so much time on their phones, and people who work for airlines aren’t as polite as they used to be

-being the only person anywhere wearing a mask

+how genuinely excited people are to see my mom (and, by extension for about 30 seconds, me)

+finding two people over a four-day weekend who are interested in talking books with me

+getting to experience the proximity to nature of camping while also having access to a toilet, shower, stove, and refrigerator (as well as a bed, and a door, and four walls)

+getting to see very important people from my chosen family (people who I think of as my aunts and uncles, and who I hardly ever get to see anymore), and talking to them about whether it was weird for them to hang out with me in my 40s when they’ve all known me since I was a baby. (They assured me it was not.)

+/- getting to hold the 2-year-old son of the groom of the wedding we were attending, a man that I held and watched over when HE was 2 years old, and feeling the full weight and significance of linear time

-wildfire smoke

-events that aren’t organized well, and especially people who put themselves in charge of things when what should happen next isn’t clear (because it’s hardly ever people who are actually connected with the event or are good are leading things)

-that moment where the music from the wedding and the music from the live band playing at the restaurant on the other side of the resort were both loudly audible from the porch of our cabin, and I got one of the most powerful headaches of my life

+the High Desert Museum, just, in general - we stopped there for about 15 minutes so that I could buy a postcard to mail to my favorite 4-year-old, and just pulling into the parking lot brought my blood pressure down 15 points

+how much legitimate fun I had watching the National US Women’s Gymnastics Championships on TV in our hotel room with my mom

+a miraculous last-minute favor from an unexpected source that fully saved my sanity

+a three-hour solo drive back over the mountains, listening to “Under Heaven Over Hell” by Florence + The Machine, which provided the perfect vibe for me to feel some feelings and process some shit