A Fall Visit Home

October was a bit of a hectic month for me and there were a couple of extra days worked over the weekends. Which I did not mind at all. But I decided to use that time as an opportunity to make a short visit home to see my family and Sara! Well, it was supposed to be short, in the end I spent a week at home due to Hurricane Sandy. I suppose worse things have happened. :)

 It was really great seeing my family and Sara again. I've been incredibly homesick and it felt good to be around familiar faces and people who I love. On Thursday night, my first night home I traveled to Cabrini to visit Fr. Carl (who had no idea I was coming!) and Stephanie and have dinner with Campus Ministry at President George's swanky digs. That was all such a fantastic feeling; it reminded me where I'm coming from and it was just plain fun to hang out with some great people. It was like no time had passed.

Looking good takes work, folks...

The next day I visited Dr. Wright and Dr. Filling a little bit and talked grad-school plans because I'm trying to keep all of my options right now and that is a very real one! After that Sara and I went to Linvilla Orchards to enjoy fall! We picked pumpkins, went on a hayride followed by a bonfire with marshmallows and apple cider. It was a beautiful day and so much fun. I've had so much fun traveling and getting out and doing different things with Sara in the five months before coming to LA and spending the day with her again it was as if we hadn't even been apart.

And I can't even begin to explain how much I missed fall! I never realized how much I loved the season until I didn't have it. Maybe I wouldn't have even known it if I didn't come to visit. And I picked the perfect time; it was just when the leaves were getting their most colorful and before the trees started to become bare. Cabrini's campus is beautiful (and a large reason why I chose the school) and it is so year 'round but it's hard to top fall there. You can't beat the East Coast in October. You just can't.

Fall! Ah how I missed the scenery of home.

Picking the right pumpkins is a skill...We both have it.

A picture from our relaxing hayride through the Orchards. Great chance to see fall up close!

So us, right?

Well, after we left Linvilla, we decided to return to the site of our first date, The Cheesecake Factory! Sara was craving some pumpkin cheesecake, because she loves all things pumpkin flavored in the fall. And who can blame her? After that, I stopped at home and saw my parents! Later still, we carved our pumpkins. Can you guess whose is whose? The next day I had dinner with my parents, grandparents, and Aunt Dorothy. It was muchos fun and incredibly relaxing.

Saturday night I crashed my brother's Halloween party--Kevin, Bridget, Tina, and Paul had no idea I was coming home and they were quite surprised to see me. It was awesome seeing them all again and even better to do it as a surprise.

Sunday night the original plan was to hang out at Cabrini and go to mass, which I was looking forward to a lot, I've missed that aspect of the Cabrini community immensely, but unfortunately, Hurricane Sandy was on the way and campus was asked to leave. Bummer!  On the bright side though, it did interfere with my flight and I wound up "stranded" at home with loved ones. Oh noooooo!!!

Those last few days at home were incredibly refreshing, fun, and invigorating. I've been struggling a lot with homesickness and it was nice to just sit around and play board games with Jack and Sara and just be around my mom and dad.

Being home was like a reset button for me emotionally. Having spent the last couple months around brand new people and having to stress about and exert so much effort into getting to know them it was a soothing reminder to simply be with people I know and love. It's so easy to take for granted that kind of relationship, and I have always tried to be very mindful of how blessed I am to have that at home, but to have not had that for a significant period of time now, to be with people so familiar and loving again was an amazing reminder of how important and life-giving it is.

My last night home Sara and I decided we needed to get out of the house--and so we grabbed a pair of ten-dollar Sixers tickets and made our way to the Wells Fargo Center. To our surprise, it was the season opener! It was a lot of fun, and they had a lot of different things to do, and in fact we missed the first half of the game exploring the place--because I have never been to the Center before, and Sara had never even been to a Sixers game! They had a craft table to color in signs, balloon hats and animals and Sara even got her face painted!

They even had Fix-it Felix Jr!

The night before leaving was incredibly difficult. More than I thought, actually. Leaving Jack again was oddly heartbreaking (odd simply because I didn't expect it) and even the thought of being away from family and Sara and the things that bring me comfort that I don't have to work at was heart-rending for a little while.

But the morning on my drive to the airport I held Sara's hand, looked out into the Philadelphia skyline as the sun was only beginning to rise and I felt calm. These things are part of who I am and distance, in the end, while difficult, does not make them less so. I am comforted in the knowledge that I will always have a place to call home full of people who love and support me...and that is the greatest gift I could ever hope for.