Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Home

I love being abroad.  Eight days from now I will hit my ten month anniversary of being out of the United States of America.  And I miss home.  The longest I have ever stayed away from my family is nine months, and maybe it was actually only eight.  Perhaps as we got older we start to realize the importance of our family, the fact that, in the end, they're most likely the ones who will still be around after everyone else has moved away and moved on.

I miss English.  Although I get enraptured in listening to French and German, I also cannot wait to step onto the street and only hear my mother-tongue.  For a while now, I have thought that I would like to travel and live abroad for years at a time.  But as fall is starting to make its way in, and the days get shorter, and the time longer since seeing the people who matter most to me, I think that, in the end, I'd rather be where my heart is.  And currently, my heart is a good 5,000 miles from where I am actually living.

My heart is sitting in the car with my mom as she drives to work, passing Baldy Mountain and the rows of fall-shaded trees that line the roads and hills in Idaho.  It's sitting on the floor in my brother's house in Eagle, playing cards with my three nieces and hanging out with my sister-in-law.  It's walking out back, past my grandma's house, onto the ditch road that lines one side of our 100-acre ranch with my dad and his dog, Abby.  It's playing garbage man with my nephew and talking about life with my brother and his wife.

Experiences are wonderful things, and I have had so very very many of them here in France.  I love my job, I am comfortable, well taken care of, and happy.  I also seem to recognize more and more, every day, that experiences are only as good as the people you are sharing them with.  In the end, I would rather have even just a few ordinary, run of the mill, experiences with the people who mean the most to me, than hundreds of thousands of extraordinary experiences without them.  Sending all my love to my family and friends back home, I miss you and love you lots.

2 comments:

  1. Awww, that's beautiful. My favorite bit - " I would rather have even just a few ordinary, run of the mill, experiences with the people who mean the most to me, than hundreds of thousands of extraordinary experiences without them."

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  2. It's true, people are what make life worth living, of making any ordinary experience awesome:)

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