Home

This week, I said goodbye to Missoula. I spent time with the remaining friends who hadn't yet left for various summer jobs and international excursions, stocked up on microbrew in cans (no PBR on multi-day river trips for me!) packed my life into my blue subaru and drove over Lolo Pass back towards home.

In many ways Missoula feels like home now too. On Tuesday, I walked along the river at dusk, watching the pearly pinks and oranges of the sunset over the river and the almost full moon rise behind the "M". I thought about how much Missoula has seen me go through, how many new connections and friendships have been created, how the seasons have cycled back to almost the same point as when I first met Missoula, back in August. Instead of just being there by default, Missoula is a home I have created. I went from knowing no one and nothing to feeling like I have a community and a niche.

Yet Moscow will always be home too. I arrived to my mom and brother seated around our red formica kitchen table and a very, very excited head butt from my dog.  It was good to sleep in my old room (second story and east facing, a stark contrast to my Missoula basement), catch up with high school friends, hear Josh Ritter on the stereo and go for runs around the neighborhoods I know by heart. Moscow is a place where I can't go downtown without seeing someone I know. Most of the people in Moscow have seen me grow from toddler to hyper elementary school kid, to bratty pre-teen, to semi-normal young adult. There is a certain comfort in everyone knowing your life story, and also certain limitations. Definitely no anonymity here, especially when Mr. La has become the "teacher/mtnbikeguy/renfairking/raftguy/etc. with brain cancer".

Dad is on a Middle Fork trip and is completely out of cell and internet service. It is strange coming home to three (I include the dog as a family member) instead of four. Home isn't quite home without him here making phone calls, reading the newspaper at the kitchen table and kissing my forehead goodnight before I go to bed. When he is gone, even when I know it is just a five day raft trip, I can't help but thinking "This is what it might be permanently".

I don't know how to discuss this topic delicately.

The reality is, my Dad may live for another 6 months, 6 years, or 30 years. There is no way to know. I am not ready for our family to shrink from five to four, but then again, there is no way I ever will be. I guess the best I can do now is be thankful for the present, knowing he IS just gone on a week long trip and that I probably have plenty more goodnight hugs, chance REI encounters, and phone conversations about dry suit features and CFS to come.

In a truly Unitarian Universalist, agnostic-y way, I know that even if my Dad isn't just a cell phone call away, he is still with me. He is in the rivers I raft, the powdered slopes I ski, the swaying pines on Moscow Mountain, the messy morning hair of my younger brother, the laugh of my mom, and the tail wag of my dog. My Dad has taught me how to love and recreate in the natural world, to stop and watch a swirling rapid, to find spirituality in wild places, to climb just one more ridge over, to bike instead of drive. He has taught me to love the home we all share in common: the earth under our feet.

And he will always reside somewhere within me, letting me know I am loved and will be okay. Even when he simply 200 miles away in the Frank Church wilderness, this is a consolation.