Opinion: Hold on to long road trips, family milestones, home ... and Mark Twain

I needed but three objectives and a book to anchor me to make the decision to drive over 5,000 miles across the country.
First, the objectives: 1. Watch my granddaughter graduate from high school; 2. Meet my great granddaughter for the first time; 3. See my daughter's first home. On the way, I would stop by Hannibal, Missouri, to visit Mark Twain's childhood home, the museums, the cave, take a ride on the riverboat, and visit his birthplace in Florida, Missouri, a few miles away. I would purchase the "Autobiography of Mark Twain," published a hundred years after his death in 1910, and read it before listening to Ron Chernow's new "Mark Twain," not so well reviewed, for 44 hours on the drive home.
Long ago, I learned that planning stops on the way home is always a poor idea, for at the end of a trip, the need to just get home is paramount. I left on Mother's Day, stopped in Fairview for a breakfast snack at Dunkin Donuts and ate some wrap that gave me a fierce need to scratch my hands, face, stomach, legs for the next two hours as I drove on to Tennessee. Finally, some bland catfish at the Cracker Barrel in Cookeville, was enough to see the itching subside and the trip become one of calm.
I was headed to Denver, Colorado, after the two days in Hannibal, to visit my son and his family, acknowledge and appreciate commencement traditions that send people we care about into the next phase of their lives. And then to see for the first time, a child related to me but three generations distant. She had just celebrated her first birthday, and such an opportunity might not pass my way again. I will remember her — the face, the expressions, the feel of her small body in my old and aging hands — for the rest of my life, fully aware that those moments will not be reciprocated by her.
I will visit old friends and former colleagues and be reminded of things and other people I hadn't thought of in years. I will stop by homes where I used to live that are now only houses for strangers. I will recall in detail certain places I visited that I had not been in 40 years and remember stories associated with the place that came back so clearly it might have been just last week. I will play board games with family members, which I have always found is the best way to have a conversation that strays beyond the game itself. And I will drive by the campus where I used to teach and park in the shade where I realized how much the place has changed, so many new buildings built, added on to, that it had lost for me the intense meaning I once had to this physical space. Universities have a way of moving on, and you have to grab that tiny place that meant something once long ago, and, just for a moment dwell there — remembering a conversation, a student face, an insight, a spot of time, as Wordsworth once called it.
Then it was on to Portland to see my daughter's home, the first that she has owned, to make the pictures that I had seen since last Christmas become a reality. To drive into the driveway, walk up to the door, be greeted by my 17-year-old granddaughter, who last greeted me on her door stoop 16 years ago, the last time I had driven there, but only from Denver (a small trip by comparison). Some days of staying in the house where my daughter's family live out their days. The quiet comfort of having a place that is finally your own, not subject to rent hikes and landlord vagaries. And I think of Miranda Lambert's song, 'The House that Built Me,' for I also believe that a physical place shapes who we are and how we become who we will be.
Then, it is time to leave, to head home — over 2,500 miles or five days of hard driving through parts of 10 states (Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa (for a minute), Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and finally North Carolina). Accompanied all the way by the story of Mark Twain — his life, his poor decisions, his tragedies. I bore them with him as I drove. Because I had started out our relationship by visiting his childhood home, I could hear the narrator's voice on my phone, and place it in the rural environment of Missouri.
We know people differently, perhaps more deeply, when we see them in their homes. I arrived home again four weeks from the day I left, having lunch four Sundays later in the same Cookeville, Tennessee, Cracker Barrel. I will be 79 this summer, and I realized fully this might be my last such trip. The trip was a way to stare my own mortality in the face and come away a bit more wise and grateful.
Margaret Earley Whitt is a retired college professor and lives in Gerton.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Reflections on family, home, mortality during 5,000-mile trip

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