Fly to the highest place

This Wednesday I travel back to where I spent the first half of my life.

North Dakota seems like a different country, what with the travel to get there, what with the culture of the people within it. It is a place that once fit my like a glove. How much has that changed, I wonder?

My childhood best friend will pick me up at the airport and we travel from Fargo to Valley City, where a large part of my heart still beats, for so much of who I am is rooted in that small town of 7,000.

Shautay even organized it to where we can go visit the house I grew up in. I realize, it perhaps seems materialistic. But when I stand in the parlor, if it is quiet enough I will close my eyes and see Dad decorating the tree late November while Celtic music plays throughout the house. I can remember evenings spent eating and cleaning together in the kitchen before dishwashers. The bathroom, brushing our teeth in over-sized adult shirts given to us by Aunt Deb after each marathon she ran.

Those foundations of what shaped me.

I want to embrace them again, and being in that house, albeit alone without the rest of my family, can give a tangible remembrance from the past.

We lived it well.