He's home

Monday, 9:07 am

By Kate

Jul

11

2005

The lad is back and it was a wonderful homecoming. He came bursting through the door and dropped all of his stuff right there and swept me right off the floor. Big hugs and and he kept saying, “It’s so good to be home!” I’ll second that!

The first thing that he wanted to do was run over to the photo store and drop his film off. I reminded him that it was 8:00 PM on a Sunday—no photo stores are open at that hour. So today we’ll drop the rolls of film off at Ritz Camera for one hour developing. The last time he came home from vacation, his cruise, we decided to have the film developed at Walgreens. Never again. They claimed that one entire roll of film was blank, which I’m sure it wasn’t. Don’t know what happened, but there was mighty unhappy kid over it. So Ritz Camera it will be.

We sat around the living room talking for a couple of hours. He had a zillion stories to tell, including ones that would have curled my hair had I known what he was doing while he was doing it. He loves telling those stories of high up places with sheer drops into deep chasms. And I think he has now officially seen more wildlife than I have. He even got to watch some wolves chase and drop an antelope. Unvarnished nature.

He brought back a pile of souvenirs and gifts for the various people in his life. By the time he was finished shopping for everyone else, he only had enough money left to buy himself a shot glass for his collection. Really pretty earrings for his stepmom and girlfriend and stuff for his dad and step bros. He brought me a really cool screen saver program with all the sights and scenes that he saw and, this cracked me up—he brought me a small handful of pretty rocks from one of the mountain tops. That’s tradition—over the years I’ve accumulated an interesting collection of rocks and shells and coral from his various trips. I can still tell you where each piece came from. These were pretty pink rocks from roughly 14,000 feet in the air.

Finally, he announced that he was going upstairs to partake of indoor plumbing. One of the wonders of the modern world, he said. It was, perhaps, the longest shower on record.

He is, as I write, sound asleep. Kind of jet lagged and still on mountain time. Meanwhile, all his stuff still sits in the middle of the living room floor. I kind of missed that.