Going away involves getting the dirty clothes from the trip washed when one returns home. I am doing that now.

I talked with #1 son last night. He wants to do more stuff with me. No problem there. He is far more emotional than I am and gives me feedback like it’s OK to cry. He told me he has a greater sense of my stepmother in his his life than my mother. Mother died in 1995, when he was 19. Dorothy, my stepmother, has been in the family since 1998, or twenty-one years. so he is right. My perspective is much broader, naturally. His concern around her current illness is quite painful for him. She is the last of the grandparents and step-grandparents in his life. Her passing will represent the final act of the Greatest Generation.

I have a post planned around the billboards I saw on the trip from The Villages through to our first stop in Macon, GA. In short, it seemed the ads for porn shops, liquor, erectile dysfunction treatments, hormone replacement therapy, HIV testing, and pro-life concerns outnumbered the usual exhortations to accept Jesus, once the billboard mainstay of the Bible Belt. Sexual liberation, it seems, is not without complications or limitations.

So I am tired. And hungry. I will have dinner with J when she gets off work at 2:30. I am incredibly glad to be home. I feel like I have been away from everyone here, my cyber-family.