What is it like to be hours from home when your brain has adjusted to being five weeks, four weeks, three weeks… days, hours, minutes from home.
Nashville is breathing through our right ears as we look south. We found ourselves again heading down I-40 West, a bit confused as to how we got here, when we started this same trip heading down I-40 West. To the Pacific and back one hour from the Atlantic, with 21 states on our used-to-be-new tires, an overdue oil change, one wounded dog, over 1,000 Facebook fans (thanks again for that, by the way), 37 days, one government shut down, four rolls of black-and-white film, 25 shows minus one due to a missing dog, endless Mexican food, zero complete books read with all the time we thought we would have, and most of our family members and friends– coast-to-coast– visited. And to think, we get an extra hour here at the end from Daylight savings, and one more as we cross back into Central time tomorrow morning. It seems we are trying to stretch our longest tour yet to its maximum capacity.
What almost home looks like is already scheduling our 2014 shows. It looks like missing the road before we left it. It looks like missing the faces we’ve seen in the last five weeks and wishing we had had this extra hour with each of them. It looks like missing strangers’ and friends’ homes. It looks like missing musty motel rooms that may-or-may-not have the refrigeration we needed to keep our food alive for one more day. It looks like starting our day jobs again (and hoping they’ll have us) so we can keep body and soul together, as Grandma always said… so that we can get back out here again, as we always say.
We have finished off our second bag of microwave popcorn and watched our third episode of Nick-at-Nite Friends, and we are wondering what it might be like in a New York City apartment or a Nashville home without the promise of some double yellow lines and a chance to play a few songs we wrote in our staying still moments. We are lucky dogs– Scott, Mallory, and Butter. Not just that we have survived this trek, but that there is a promise of many treks to come.
We’ll see you there.