Post vacation is so hard. Two realities colliding – all that you are coming home to, all that you are leaving behind, both existing in the same moment. This is the day after, and the day before. And this is the day that’s particularly hard to get through.

I’m walking in large circles around my exhausted suitcase, contemplating unpacking. I’m walking in large circles around next steps, contemplating going back to bed.

My eyes keep tearing up. I’m lonely. I miss mother and my 5 brothers and sisters and their partners and spouses and kids and grandkids and the chaos that was a family vacation. It’s my first day home, and it’s just so quiet – just Gilligan snoring on the couch and the click of the keyboard to keep my company.
There were moments during the last 2 weeks when any silence sounded like heaven to me. All that clattering around in a tiled beach house – all those blaring rooms decorated in hospital pastels. Moments stuffed with too much happening, kitchens stuffed with too many people, lamps stuffed with too many seashells. (In case of deafening emergency, break glass and shove seashells in your ears).
The pace always changes on vacations, but for me it speeds up instead of slows down. Always places to be, places to go, places to arrive. Long lines at the dairy queen, impossible lines at the grocery store, endless lines of traffic across the bridge, on the beltway, through security. People everywhere, on every surface, in every conceivable corner. And someone always to love you, and for you to always love.

And then home.

Trying to settle in, I take a walk and two great herons rise above me, so close I can feel the air rush from their wings. The sky is an impossible neon blue and the breeze from the bay lifts me, after the airless, humid skies of North Carolina. But even here the heat has arrived. The tiger lilies are almost gone. Yarrow and toadflax and cow parsley are the sole survivors – ready for the driest, hottest days to come. The fields look spent and thirsty, the pond a sleepy green.

And the sound of my own heart is a surprise; leftover love spilling everywhere. I miss them all, but I’m grateful to be back. I’m somewhere between where I wanted to be, and where I need to go. I’m caught between breaths, in the bittersweet stillness of my own hushed and holy arrival home.