Transitioning

We stay in one spot longer than most of our fellow travelers, at least many we consider friends (there are a lot of us out here these days!) That means life in houses, cabins, hotels and the Airstream alike.

Transitions like that can have a major affect on people’s lives. Kids can get shaken up by different surroundings. Schedules that feel completely required can get shaken to a stir. A simple need like “dinner” can be hard to come by when the closest restaurant or grocery store open on a Sunday might be an hour plus away.

All of this can mount up to a cranky van’s worth of babies, parents and the impending setup of a home in the middle of prairie Colorado; current temperature 102F.

And then Winter says, as he’s falling asleep in the Airstream after a month of random cabin bunkbeds, “I love my bed.”

He meant this particular bed, the one where “I sleep alone and T is across from me and Nanny is right in the next room.”

A week earlier a friend had asked him where he was from, to which he replied, “I’m a traveling kid.”

He was conceived on the road, and born into it. He makes me smile sometimes so hard I know I’ll eventually have Aerosmith-mouth syndrome.

As the babies all went down, evaporating this day into their nighttime varieties, the older boy and I tossed around the old pigskin. The part of Colorado that feels like Kansas all around us, all the while, we practiced Americana as a tumultuous thunderstorm rose on the horizon like only a Great Plains fury can impose.

And so a few hours later we were treated to fireworks that well surpassed our greatest expectations for the holiday. Lightning struck, high and spiderwebbing occasionally, a display like I’ve not seen in years. The edges of it all sent a small drizzle over our campsite, not more than an empty spot of hayfield with a 30amp hookup, and then it was over.

Everyone falling asleep, stars began to poke their noses even as the biting flies and tiny mosquitos gave way to a cool evening’s worth of distant chirping crickets. The headlights of a car shine in the distance and my last twenty minutes before bed is spent watching them near.