The Finish Line

On May 3, I gave my final exams at Rider. On May 4, I graded them. On May 5, I flew to Nashville from Princeton for the final time. It was the final plane ride back to my husband after being away from him for the past nine months. It didn't come a moment too soon. I felt like I was limping in, like Dr. House after a long night on the hospital floor. Something like that.

Daryl met me at the airport with a huge hug. The last week of our long-distance marriage hadn't been too kind to him, either--in the middle of his final exams his computer crashed and he, the king of backing up files, had neglected to  back up one particular paper that he then had to rewrite from scratch. Have you heard utter despair over the phone before? I sure did, the morning that paper got eaten... Poor boy. We practically collapsed into each other's arms in the terminal.

"This has been the hardest year of my life," I said. I'm prone to large amounts of exaggeration and apocryphal storytelling, but this was the utter truth. "This has been the hardest month of that year. And this has been the hardest week of that month."

He held me for a moment, rubbed my back in that wonderful lower-back region that makes me curl up like a happy cat, then said, "Let's go get breakfast." (Yet another thing I love about him: he understands that, while food doesn't solve problems, it does help take the edge off of them...)

So we did. There was no grand celebration yet. No fireworks or large, extravagant gifts given to one another in honor of the occasion (hey, we're grad students...). There was no award from the Mayor of Marriages in honor of our survival. There was just him and me and the knowledge that we never, EVER had to do this again. We ate a leisurely breakfast of fruit and juice and then got down to the next business: packing.

We had a deadline in SoCal. My parents (thank you, thank you, thank you!), knowing how tired we would be at the end of this season, booked a cruise vacation for the four of us leaving from Los Angeles on May 9. We needed to return my friend's car to her in Monterey, CA. So after breakfast we hurriedly packed up Daryl's life from the last year in order to began the 42-hour drive from Nashville to Los Angeles via Monterey.

Daryl is, shall we say, a contemplative packer. He muses about where each item should go, thinks about each book or piece of clothing, and generally drives me (and eventually himself) crazy. So he ran the errands and I did the packing. I am speedy-packer-girl. I also have no problem throwing things - this pair of tennis shoes from high school, a shirt with holes in it, a book with serious water damage - away. That helps. So I packed. And packed. And packed and packed and packed. And we headed off for our first night's hotel (St. Louis, about 6 hours away) around 6:30pm. Ah well, it was a start.

It seemed fitting somehow to end this marathon of a season with a long drive across the country. We've done more of these than most people in the past five years of dating and marriage. Daryl dropped me off at my magazine internship in Colorado right after our undergraduate graduation. We drove to Princeton to move in. We drove to Los Angeles and back for a summer internship. And this season we ended our long separation by driving to California to see a dear friend and then get on a cruise boat. It's pretty easy to do that much driving if you know food, sun, and a pool lounge chair await you. And if you're just so overjoyed at the presence of the man you love that you'd happily drive forever if it meant it was just you and him and nothing more.

Speaking of road trips: I never know what to post on Facebook or not. I like to share what I'm up to, but sometimes it gets me in trouble. People find out I've been in town and feel hurt I didn't call or visit, even though I was only there for a day (or a few hours!). I thank people in a status only to forget one or two important ones (hurt feelings! so bad!). I overshare without meaning to, or update when I'm in a grumpy mood and sound too harsh and unpastoral. They're' tricky nowadays, these Internets.

Anyway, on our drive across the country I updated where we were every night, to keep people (including my parents) posted on our driving progress and because it's fun to update Facebook from cities across the country. Also, hooray! I wasn't in New Jersey anymore!

Because my family of friends (my fremly, as my sister Caroline calls her own) is so dear, thoughtful, and wonderful, almost everywhere I stopped I had people commenting and asking why we didn't stay with them/their family. For free! They'd feed us! Why not?

Kind gestures, to be sure, but hey: I had just lived apart from my husband for nine months. We were getting a hotel room, gosh darn it. 'Nuff said.

And so we drove. And drove and drove.

We saw this (yes, at night - no, not with the cool moon shining through it):

And lots and lots (too much!) of this:

And this strange addition to the Utah salt flats:

Daryl and his friends Chris and Steven have a special name for this piece of art, but it isn't particularly blog-appropriate. You can ask any of them yourself, if you want.

But mostly, I saw this:

Boy, was it a sight for sore eyes...