All Good Things...

This morning at 1:45am, my parents boarded the plane back to CA.  My mom mistakenly booked the flight thinking that it left at 1:45pm... but in the end it turned out to be a very nice time to leave.  We spent a leisurely day at home and had a nice, home-cooked last lunch.  There was time for a siesta, making bocadillos for the plane, and all of our good-byes.  We packed up the car and headed to Malaga at about nine in the evening in order to take advantage of their coastal departure and have one last seafood meal before heading back to land-locked Plumas County.

It was a wonderful way to end a wonderful visit.  Though it was strange for me as I drove home from Malaga.  My parents have been here now for just over a month.  We'd fallen into a routine.  As my mom, puts it, they became part of daily life--not just visitors.  That might sound like a euphemism, but really it was fabulous to have them here, and not just because they helped us with more than half a dozen home improvement tasks either!

It had become so normal to have them here, that there was a part of me that expected to be getting on the plane and heading back to Sierra Valley myself.  This visit really has been a collision of my two worlds in a most beautiful (and I'll admit, somewhat unexpected) way.

My parents haven't come to Spain for four years--since my wedding.  That visit was of course fairly hecktic and far from relaxing.  And in these four years my life has changed quite a lot.  I have made new friends, lost some old ones, and seen some of my first students graduate high school.  I have become a part of daily life in La Roda rather than being simply a visitor myself.  At the same time, this place has become more a part of me, too.  The fact that I feel more at home here now than the other times that my parents have visited was part of what made this visit so relaxing; I was at home, and so were they.

So although I pulled away from the curb at Pablo Picasso International Airport feeling as though I should have been checking in and going "home" too, I was happy to be heading back inland to my dog, my wife, our house and our life.