I just got back from a 6 day jaunt to the land of my youth.  It started out a couple of months ago as a chance to see my younger sister's kids, including my nephew who just graduated from high school, while she and her husband went off to celebrate their 25th anniversary.  Then my dad got sick, and the trip got extended to include a side trip to visit him for a couple of days.  Which ended up including a trip back to the Christian camp where I was either a camper or a summer staff member from the time I was 13 until I was 20.  It was exhausting and exhilarating and amazing and........ exhausting.  I just got off the treadmill (which included 25 minutes at 7% incline, which I only do when I really need to work off some steam) where I decided it was like being on a rollercoaster with a steamroller drum attached, so you are utterly flattened by the time you swoop through the nadir and start climbing back up, then you pop back up like a cartoon character and get ready for the next run.  Plenty of fodder for posts in there, but I don't know how much time I'll have to think it through in the next few days since I am now way behind in the class I'm auditing and will have the quite the time getting caught up.

A couple of brief impressions, though.  my almost-18-yr-old nephew was amazing.  Of course I didn't tell him any of the cartloads of past shit I could have if he was going to understand all of the implications of what was going on, and he is thankfully exactly like every other 18-year-old and didn't really want to know.  But he was utterly supportive in his own completely unknowing way.  We spent about 24 hours at my younger sister's house, then about 24 hours with my dad, then 24 hours with my older sister, then another 24 hours with my dad, and then drove back to my younger sister's house for the last day (I told you it was wild!).  After the first stretch at my dad's house, which was difficult to say the least, I got in the car and my nephew ran back in to get something he had forgotten.  by the time he came back out, I had the stereo blasting Sleigh Bells as loud as I could without blowing the speakers on my sister's car, and he took it right in stride.  When i told him I needed a dairy queen (because sometimes a blizzard is just what you have to have), he just laughed, got out the tomtom, and found me one.  How amazing is that?  How do you even find a dairy queen on a tomtom?  What would we do without these kids who know how to run all our technology?  He was so awesome.  I didn't get to see my younger sister on this trip because of the way our flights worked out, but she and her husband were there in the way they have raised him.

And my older sister, who is also amazing, who when I was sinking down into a mire of loss and regret and self-pity, reached in a hand and pulled me out in a matter of about twenty minutes with a late night conversation after we finally got all the kids in bed.  I'm so lucky to have the people I have in my life.

wow, that sounds really melodramatic, doesn't it?  Really, from the exterior, it was a very calm, lovely trip.  I'm pretty sure that other than my brief meltdown with my sister, I handled it pretty well.  But I'm going to be dealing with the fallout for awhile, I think.