One more winter in Germany, and going home

I wasn't ready to call it. Landing back in the US in September 2016 felt less like an ending than a pause, and after a couple of months I did something that probably made sense only to me: I flew back to Germany for one more winter, from November 2016 to February 2017. Nowhere new, nothing left to prove geographically — I'd already crossed the distance from Laredo to Istanbul to Thorong La Pass to a whale shark in the Philippines. I think I just wasn't finished being the person the trip had turned me into, and going back to a place I already half-knew felt like a way to hold onto that a little longer before real life pulled me back in.

It didn't last. My kids asked me to come home, and I went, no hesitation. Almost two years after crossing into Mexico with a one-way ticket and a rule about not flying, I was back in the US for good — or at least for the next decade.

I don't tell this part of the story as a disappointment. I'd do it again exactly the same way, kids-asking-me-home included. They were the reason I left in the first place. Of course they were also going to be the reason I came back. What I didn't know yet was that stepping off the road wasn't going to mean stepping away from the version of myself I'd built out there — it just meant pointing that same energy somewhere new. That's a different chronicle, one I'll be adding here in time: ten years of advocacy, board seats, a legislative run lost by two percent, and eventually the decision to become a Bangkok condo tenant instead of a Kansas homeowner. But that's not this one. This one ends the way it started — with my kids, and me choosing them again.