It was probably about two hours after we all said goodbye.  Loaded into our separate rides and drove away.

Somewhere on Colorado Highway 9.

The mountains were being their beautiful selves.  Maybe there was a song playing.  I was lost in thought, not completely aware of what was happening in my brain and in my heart and in my mind.  Until.  I was crying.  Not like sobbing, just like tears leaking out behind my sunglasses and I was sort of surprised and sort of on track.

My heart was full and heavy and satisfied and restless.  All the opposing things a heart can be.  Especially a heart of one sister after leaving a gathering with her three brothers and her father.  A gathering not of the variety we often have.  A gathering after many years of not being together in one space.  A gathering filled with laughter and the shouts of children and story telling and old old jokes that everyone knows we should have long forgotten but are as much a part of our family repertoire as the blue eyes and the last name we all share.  A gathering that age and wisdom and long years have proven to us all to be a rare and fleeting sort of get together.  Where the unspoken thought, the barely verbalized truth is – when we see one another next, what will be different?  What will have changed?

And I was raised with boys.  Boys who don’t process all of their feelings out loud.  Boys who became men who still speak and act and think in ways strikingly similar to the ways in which they communicated as teenagers.  And so there is a lot that remains unsaid.  Words that hang in the air and we all know we don’t have to say them, but if you are me – you sort of want to hear them anyway.

Sometimes they get said.  Certainly.  There were moments and opportunities.  Late nights and early mornings.  Porch conversations in the shadow of the overpowering Rocky Mountains.  Hushed tones and stifled laughter for those of us who can handle post-ten o’clock bedtimes. (When did my family become full of such old men?)  Mugs full of hot cocoa or hot tea or hot coffee and words rising to the surface and hugs that spoke what we couldn’t say.

And, there, in my car, drifting south at a moderate speed (I promise) I was overcome with All The Feelings.  

The missteps and the successes.  The still and always strong desire to have my momma in my life.  The beauty and the pain of watching my father grow old.  The ways I’ve watched my brothers (and myself) wrestle with life and come out at times the victor and at times the loser.  And how I’ve been witness to so much and said so little.  How I’ve tied my own hands and fought the wrong battles.  How I’ve held on to what doesn’t matter and forgotten to value what should.

Introspective.  Retrospective.  All the “spectives”.

It’s probably too much thinking time on clear mountain roads in the second prettiest state in America.

If my brothers got all the genes for massive facial hair (did you see their beards?) then I got all the genes for Feeling Too Much.

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