This is it

Today is my last day at my parents house.  I've been crashing here since I graduated from Juniata in May.  I've kept myself busy picking up various "sitting" jobs (kids, babies, dogs, the elderly, houses) and various church activities including a week-long trip to Tennessee to rebuild houses.

A lot of parts of living at home with my parents really stank.  It felt like some sort of weird time warp, especially since I was driving the same car, sleeping in the same bed and working the same jobs I worked in high school.  None of my friends lived very close, so life could get pretty lonely.  A lot of days, my only company was my dog, Sachi, until I picked up the kids from school.  And while children are better conversational partners than anxiety ridden poodles, it was a very different life from the people-packed life I lived at Junaita, where I would sometimes go to the bathroom just to get a moment to myself.

But life at home wasn't all bad.  I've made deep connections to some of the families I worked for and am leaving them with a very heavy feeling (shout out to you, Meg and Abby and Jack).  I also got to know many of the people in my life on a new level, on an adult level.  That sounds really lame, but when you grow up in a church (or any kind of community), every adult is kind of a surrogate parent, dispensing advice, being proud of you, telling you to stop running around.  But coming home from college, I no longer had the "kid" label on me.  It's really cool to be respected as an equal and to be able to work and serve and laugh as friends.  I've really treasured my time as an adult in the church congregation I grew up in, and I've also enjoyed being able to have more meaningful conversations with the other grown ups in my life.  There's still a great deal of difference between a 23 year old and a 53 year old, but college graduation has served as sort of rite of passage that lets me feel like I belong to that grown-up world.  Even through things as little as calling adults by their first name.

But just to prove I'm not too grown up, I'm only halfway packed and am still running around like a mad woman trying to find the things I swore I saw just a minute ago.