A Vacation Completed

Top o’ the morning all!

As of today, I’m officially back from vacation. We have one more weekend of summer, and then school starts for us next week, and I couldn’t be more excited to dive into work.

For part of our vacation, we went to the Badlands of North Dakota (or, more specifically, Theodore Roosevelt National Park). It’s a place filled with childhood memories and soaked in nostalgia, as we traveled there frequently when I was a child. I don’t think many summers passed when we didn’t make at least one camping trip out there.

Nostalgia is certainly a powerful drug, but it was also interesting to note how different the world seems through adult eyes instead of those of a child. Small towns that seemed expansive and never-ending to my little legs revealed themselves to be only a few blocks across. Enormous campgrounds that provided hours of play are likewise much smaller now that I’ve grown much larger. Nostalgia strikes me hardest when something is both so familiar and yet so different than I remember it.

It was good to visit again, and good, too, to bask in a silence that seems unique to the wide open plains of the Midwest.

I’ve walked through the snow in the early morning hours before the airport wakes and before commuters fill the streets with their incessant noise. There is a silence there, too, a quiet that allows you to hear the soft crunch of snow underfoot, but it’s a distinct silence from the silence of the plains. In the city, silence is a pause, a momentary respite, a breath being drawn in before a thousand voices shout at once.

On the plains, silence is the norm, broken by the call of a songbird or the rustle of wind through the tall wild grasses. There’s a weight to it, a heaviness that feels more like the protection of a thick blanket than an additional burden.

I miss that silence and the quiet that comes from emptiness, and it was a joy to experience it again.