Today, I woke up in Bellingham, our old hometown, in a hotel room of my very own, across the green from Village Books.
How delightful!
Bellingham is the place where my husband earned his theater masters and his teaching certificate before we moved to Wilsonville, and is especially close to my heart because it’s where our daughter Samantha was born.
I got an education on the way here on the Amtrak train from the nineteen-year-olds in my seating area. I learned: A young man’s perspective on being a U.S. soldier in Afganastan, that I have a good-shaped nose for piercing, that one should not get too large of a hole put in their body when getting pierced, what it feels like to get it pierced, what it (sometimes) sounds like to get pierced, how to pretend to have Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome to get released from the army, how spiders spin webs, kill their prey, suck their guts out and mate.
I could have learned about car engines, but I chose to read some of Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder instead. I learned how to walk on a speeding train, how to use one of those toilet-seat covers for the first time ever in my life, how to pirate DVDs (should I ever wish to do such a thing, which I don’t), how to remember some of my Eurorail adventures from my college days, one young woman’s understanding and personal experience of the Holy Ghost, and how to trust that no one would walk off with my luggage.
For some reason, this last one, was perhaps the most challenging for me. But the rest was easy and thoroughly enjoyable.
Surely, there were a myriad of publishable ideas in these flurries of conversation. But more than anything, as a mom who typically inhabits the same orbit day after day after day, I enjoyed the freshness of breaking routine. The vast difference in thoughts and ideas between nineteen-year-olds and my five-year-old. And the fact that, though my train ride was nothing like what I’d imagined, it was refreshing and educational, just the same.
I also remembered that when I became a mom, my mind more than ever grasped tightly the idea of personal safety and how to keep my family safe. And that as a singleton traveling out into the world, one is much more likely to venture outside the zone, ask absurd questions, and simply let go and take it all in.
Maybe we moms could all use a little more adventures in our lives. Adventures without our kids, as well as all of those we take with them. It was a good reminder, even if the adventure was as tame as the train from Portland to Bellingham.
Oh, and by the way, I’ll be at Village Books tonight at 5:00 p.m. Can’t wait to see some old friends.
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