Saudade

As my AT adventure is starting to slowly wind down (Less than 400 miles left? Where did the time go? Just yesterday I was slogging my ass through Virginia with a TERRIBLE haircut), I've been thinking a lot lately about my best and worst moments on the trail.  I'm not going to write about those right now, however, as I've still got another 400 or so miles to go, which will hopefully be filled with the sorts of moments that make my heart sing and with none of the ones that will make me cringe later in life (for reference: see old photos of my shaved head).

Instead, I'm going to tell you about the only day on the trail when I wanted to go home.  Before I got down to Georgia, a couple of thru-hikers had told me that at some point, everyone wants to quit.  Their advice for when that day arrived was this: quit tomorrow.  But on the day I wanted to go home, it wasn't because I wanted to quit, but because I felt devastatingly alone and as if I was missing out on one of the biggest moments of my life.

On the day I wanted to go home, I called my sister at a predetermined time, and she casually left her cell phone on the dining room table as she and Seth handed my mom and Seth's mom mother's day cards.  I listened as they opened their cards and read the inscription "We hope you like your gift, because we're not returning it."  Ivy had already told me that they had put a small photo showing a small black object shaped like a peanut floating in a pool of hazy greyness inside the card.  I'd known about the object since Hogback Ridge Shelter, in Tennessee, and when they had told me on that night I was going to be an aunt I had yelled out loud with joy.  (They then told me that I couldn't break the news to ANYONE, and consequently I couldn't explain to my thru-hiking friends why I was yelling in the middle of the woods at night.) The moment at which both my mother and Seth's mother realized what they were looking at nearly broke my heart.  By the time that my father and Seth's father realized why their wives were screaming I was crying, quietly, on the other end of the line.  I've never wanted to be somewhere else, so desperately, in my entire life.

Being, as my dad so eloquently put it the other day, "within the weather map" of home has been amazing, in part because it's allowed me to continue my seven week streak of seeing people I love just about every weekend (and taking zero days with them), but also because it's put me in close proximity to my sister.  Her belly has grown tremendously each of the three times I've seen her since March, and every time I see her, after I say hello to her, I bend down and say hello to my little niece or nephew.  I pat my sister's belly, and and tell the peanut to grow well, because I can't wait to welcome him or her to this glorious world.

 

AWESOME!

(Hey, SisterPants: nice job one-upping me this summer.)