Of Course

 The difference between two and a half hours and twenty hours cannot be overstated. One was a plane trip. One was a drive across the western United States. Colorado, Wyoming. Utah, Nevada, and California. In between there was a twenty-four hour period of family and collapsing my mother's house into manageable bits and reconnecting with the aforementioned family. It could be that those hours spent connecting and collapsing put the right amount of perspective on the enterprise of flying and driving. 

It could be. It might also have to do with the fact that I rarely spend a seventy-two hour period for which every moment is accounted. 

Busy. 

In motion.

The question that came up early in the planning of this voyage was this: Will you and your younger brother have twenty hours of things to talk about? What might not have been factored in at that time was the twenty-four hour period spent in our hometown doing the work of constructing the new normal for my mom. We knew before we left California that our time in Colorado would be a drop in the bucket compared to the actual chore of moving my mother out of the house in which she had lived for more than twenty-five years, a timeframe much larger than the twenty-four hours we had to give. 

Which was a topic that periodically dominated our discussion on the trip back across the badlands. We drove through the day and into the night, stopping long enough to get a night's sleep and a shower. We listened to a podcast or two, and a lot of music. We made a wrong turn just once around Salt Lake City, but we forgave ourselves for that while we continued to talk.

And talk. 

Because the overriding time that became apparent was not the day spent in Colorado or the chunks of two days spent driving west. It was the lifetime spent being brothers. We reminisced, selecting the greatest hits of our shared childhood. And then there was all those years in between. And the years ahead. What woudl they hold?

So, if the question was simply, "Will you and your brother have anything to talk about during that long trip?" The answer would be, "Of Course."