Tuesday, June 20, 2017
The next morning, AJ sat at the desk jotting down details onto her notebook, details which, after sleep and a hot shower, trickled back to her mind, ran up to the present, then to the future to cover the day\’s planned activity: leaving. It would be a long flight back filled with the usual torture of unrest–it was all before her and she was anxious to get it over with.
But before all that, AJ explored the building a little more. The bed and breakfast was in the “newer” houses in Edinburgh, the original domiciles of bourgeois whisky merchants, with elaborately decorated, high-ceilinged rooms with lots of space outside in front and behind the building. She couldn\’t sit in the high clear windows and ponder the details, because the clock was ticking down, they were leaving, there was not enough time to savor the atmosphere.
She joined B and TwoSon for breakfast, where she ordered her last “full breakfast” of sausage, ham, tomato, beans and oatcakes.
They packed the car and navigated eight miles through muck and mire of tangled Edinburgh streets and turnabouts, through an figure-eight-shaped roundabout twice because they missed the first turn, to the car return. At airport security, TwoSon was snagged for a random check, and bewildered, confused and a little embarrassed, succumbed to patting down as AJ explained what was happening to him.
During the plane ride home, AJ filled the time with distractions, since an oblivious seat-kicker sitting behind her made sleeping impossible. The seat kicker didn’t tap frequently enough to warrant a plea, but enough to cause AJ to think undeservedly badly about the clueless young woman. So she filled some of the time with reviewing and adding to her trip notes, listening to Rob Roy and eating the distracting airline food. In Chicago, they trudged through customs, picked up their luggage, rode the shuttle to the parking garage for an extra specially long ride home through Chicago rush-hour, construction and obstructed traffic.
Along the route through Chicago to her southwest Michigan home, billboards blared obscenely (and about obscene things) from the roadside, in such blaring contrast to the comparably peaceable highways and roads in the UK.
This trip made AJ forget all the worries of home for a while, and replaced them with an new set of worries (challenges), like staying hydrated, navigating one-lane, two-way roads, sheep crossings, not falling off treacherous cliffs, not losing TwoSon on the Tube, etc. They were refreshing worries, worries and challenges that made one’s mind expand and strengthen. For a minute, she forgot about laundry, dinner, exercise, parenting (to an extent) and her neurotic self-worth meter. The trip added meaning to her life by giving her material with which to create something (this blog), letting her experience something different from what she was accustomed to and forcing her to change, to acclimate to UK’s rule, etiquette, conditions, weather and currency.
Sometimes, many times … most times for AJ, the clearest appreciation, enjoyment, satisfaction and lessons learned came in hindsight; when she was going home; when she returned to her routine and the differences floated to the top of her thought and made themselves glaringly clear. It was the differences that made all the difference (what she also refers to as gradients), it was the differences that made her go and risk and experience, and it was the differences that summoned her back home again.
As she looked back on the trip from a distance in time, some differences and lessons still glowed and shone as intriguing to her:
Thanks for reading!
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| Walking the Hills of The Scottish Highlands |
Not I 