There's been shopping and visiting and eating Pat & Oscar's breadsticks. We've been to Point Loma to see professors, including but not limited to my friend and roommate from college who decided to get a doctorate and then get hired by our alma mater. We've seen all my grandparents, all my aunts and uncles, and all my cousins. We've seen my nieces and nephew and their parents. The sun has shined. I've visited with friends. California is, perhaps, the best way to end a summer. On Friday we leave to go camping for the weekend and on Monday we'll leave from the campground to return home.
I'll have to write about picking my cousin up from the high school and watching as The Rock Star soaked in what it was like to, "be inside high school." I'll have to write about the waves of nostalgia I feel when I step foot onto 3900 Lomaland Drive and see the ghosts of my friends' faces in the nameless crowds of eager freshman just starting their collegiate careers. I'll have to write about how my parents 12-year-old golden retriever just wandered down the hall to find me and how I wonder how many wanders she has left. But for now the time has come to get my toddler up from his nap. The time has come to savor his sleepy little body as he folds it into my own. When I visit people and places it seems that time stands still. I am catapulted back to high school, or college, or another time in another place. But when he sighs a breath of contentment on my chest as sleep paves way to energy and life, I am, simply, mama.
And as much as a long for a day spent in a time when I was young and I didn't ever have to leave California, mama is who I was always meant to be. Mama is where my heart is.
Except earlier today when I wasn't sure which son would kill the other first and I stood in between trying to be the parent. Yeah. Except that.
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