On Return

 The silence seems deafening.

 I sit, mostly alone at my computer, catching up on emails.  The boys are being tucked into bed, the girl putters around upstairs getting ready.  I feel so isolated.

 The past week has been spent living in close community, pressed up against seventeen other individuals.  Personal space was found only in the tiny cubicle of the washroom as others waited noisily outside.  We slept eleven in the girls room, and travelled with 15 squished into a van and 3 in a pickup, exactly as many seats as bums.  The idea of personal space quickly became a foreign concept as we embraced the lack of space.  There was much spooning, hand hugs, and squishing.  We hugged a lot.  And, until I turned the lights out at night, there was always noise.

 Now that I've left the land of dust, mountains and ocean behind, I'm readjusting to living with space.  We've been released back to normal living and I for one am finding it challenging.  I miss the laughter, the tears and prayer, the odd, meaningful or silly conversations that speckled our days.  Now instead of sitting outside drinking apple pop(sooo goood!) listening to my teens, I'm sitting here at my computer desk ridding my inbox of email and catching up on correspondence.

 There is blessing in the quiet, in the space to think and breathe.  But the blessing of quiet tends to be the obvious one.  I am sitting here missing the blessing of noise, of community, of wrapping our lives hard around one another.  We started slow, unsure, with some definite groups.  But we ended strong and loud, our walls broken down, wrapped in love.

 I don't know where we'll go from here, how those bonds will change outside of the pressure cooker of Mexico.  It will be different, I'm sure, now that we're no longer the crazy gringos.  So I'll cling to the good memories and embrace the quiet even as it feels so very very odd.