%20(1500%20x%20600%20px).png)
Coming Home
After Bruno and I picked up the camper in Buffalo, we headed east. Back to Owego, New York. Back to the farm. Back to my stepdad. I left the dealer tentative and unsure, still getting used to how I fit on the road with the Dawn behind me. And then, almost immediately, the New York State Thruway. There's nothing quite like being thrown into highway driving with a camper on your first real day out. It was a quick learning curve.
It was raining. Not a soft drizzle you can navigate on autopilot, but a constant deluge that had me watching the road and watching my mirrors and quietly bargaining with the universe not to hydroplane. My rear camera became my best friend. Bruno, meanwhile, was silently judging my poor driving skills from his comfortable nest in the back. The first gas stop was its own kind of anxiety. I sat in the Pathfinder for a moment before pulling in, running through every possible scenario, terrified I'd have to back up. We made it in and out without incident. I considered it a victory.
And then Owego. The beautiful old bridge. The view of the courthouse. The houses on Front Street saying hello like they always had. I felt it before I could name it. Bittersweet. Incomplete. And like home, all at the same time.
Returning to a place you love after almost four years feels like seeing an old friend after too long apart. The recognition is instant. The relief is real. And underneath it all, the quiet ache of everything that's changed since you were last together.
— — —
I hadn't been home since my mom's celebration of life. We hadn't always found our way to easy ground, my stepdad and I. There was history between us the way there's always history between people who love the same person and grieve her differently. My mom had left a hole that neither of us knew how to talk around. We'd been circling it separately, from a distance, for a long time.
I didn't know what to expect when I arrived. Our relationship had always been complicated, shaped by loss and distance and the particular difficulty of two people who loved the same woman and never quite found their footing with each other. I wasn't sure what four years and a shared grief would have done to us.
Owego isn't where I grew up, but it's woven into me in ways that are hard to explain. It was my mom's hometown, which meant childhood summers with my grandmother, Strawberry Festivals, playing at the Hickories, and the particular freedom of a small town that feels safe enough to get lost in. When my mom moved back to Owego in her later years, I followed in my own way. I spent a year living there after backpacking through Asia, getting to know it all over again as an adult. Then she and my stepdad moved to the farm, and that became the home I came back to. Pretty much every summer. Lots of holidays. Until she died.
Her handprints were on every inch of that farm: in the way things were arranged, in the rhythms of the place, in what my stepdad still did exactly the way she liked it. And in her gardens. Full of iris and bleeding hearts, peonies and hydrangeas, everything lush and thoughtfully arranged the way only someone who truly loved growing things could manage. Walking past them without her felt like reading a letter she had written and left behind, every bloom placed exactly where she meant it to be. And then there was her kitchen. The place where I had cooked so many great meals, made bread and cheese with her, sat and talked and played cards for hours. That kitchen held more of our relationship than anywhere else on earth. Being back without her meant walking through the kitchen door and looking, without thinking, for her in that chair. The one in the sunbeam. The one by the door. It took a second every time to remember she wouldn't be in it.
My grandmother's iris. My mother's lilacs.
As I pulled into that driveway after all that time, I didn't know what would be waiting for me. What I found was something I hadn't expected: a little grace. We healed something, my stepdad and I. Not in a dramatic way. There were no big conversations, no formal reckoning. It was quieter than that. He went about his chores the way he always had. I set up my little office in the camper and worked remotely, parked right there on the farm, close but not in the way. We came together for meals. He made his pancakes. The best pancakes in the world, and I will not be taking questions on that. Bruno was on his absolute best behavior, living his best dog life in his favorite spot in the world. Some places just suit a dog completely, and this was his.
Bruno lived his best dog life.
The hardest thing I did that month I did quietly, without announcement. Her ashes belonged to the farm, in my stepdad's mind, and I understood why. She had always been there. But after four years, pieces of her had started disappearing from the farm and my gut told me not to wait any longer. My stepsisters had already begun erasing so much of her, and I couldn't bear the thought of losing the chance entirely. While I was there I took some of them, not all, just some. Enough. I needed to know that part of her was somewhere I would always be welcome to come back to. Somewhere that couldn't be taken from me.
So my aunt and uncle and cousin came down and took Bruno and I to the lake to the north of the farm, where my mom and my aunt had spent their summers as girls. Where their parents' ashes already were. We placed some of her ashes there too, bringing her back to the people she came from, the place she loved. My stepdad didn't come. That was okay. Grief asks different things of different people, and this was mine to do.
I don't have the words for what that felt like. I'm not sure I'm supposed to yet.
Looking back now, I realize I was saying hundreds of little goodbyes that month. To the farm. To him. To what remained of her there. I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. I thought I was just visiting.
— — —
It was a wonderful month, spent with friends and family in a place that will always hold a huge piece of my heart. Bruno had the time of his life and finally, in the last days, the rain let up just enough for him to get his ride in the Rustler, the farm's side by side. He was in his element. Ears back, tongue out, surveying his kingdom from the back of that blue machine like he owned every acre of it.
And then it was over.
The morning I left, the sky opened up. I was barely out of the driveway when the tears came. Before I'd even made it to the road, before I could pretend I was fine, before I'd had a single mile to build up the wall you build when you're leaving somewhere that matters.
A few minutes later my phone lit up. A text from my stepdad.
Did you see me on the porch?
I hadn't. I'd been too busy falling apart.
I was singing Happy Trails, he said. Like we always used to do.
Every time I left the farm, my mom would send me off with Happy Trails. Every single time, without fail, it was her ritual, her way of saying I love you and come back and you are always welcome here all at once. And there he was, alone in the pouring rain on the porch, keeping her alive in the only way he knew how.
I had driven right past him. I hadn't seen.
I pulled over and I let myself cry for a while.
I didn't know that would be my final goodbye. But somewhere deep down, I think I knew I did. Either way, I knew this moment was different. Bigger. Heavier.
The Dawn carried me safely back to Wyoming. By the end of May we were home, the camper parked in her new home at the top of our driveway, waiting for the next adventure. That whole journey east deserves its own telling, and I'll get there. But what I want you to know is that I came home from that farm with something I hadn't expected: a little more peace. A few wounds quieter than they'd been. And the image of an old man on a rain-soaked porch, singing to someone who was already gone and someone who was already leaving, holding the thread between them the only way he could.
— — —
When we finally turned off the interstate and hit our dirt road, I rolled the windows down for Bruno. He knew exactly where he was. I could feel it in him before I could see it. We bumped down that familiar road and something in me unclenched for the first time in weeks. I had driven across states, navigated the New York State Thruway in a deluge, managed gas stops and farm driveways and a month of grief and healing, and I had made it home in one piece. I was proud of myself. I pulled the Dawn up the driveway, conceded defeat on my backing skills, and let my husband take it from there. Some battles you choose not to fight.
Bruno's brother and sister moved into the camper life with us. Moose, twelve years old and dignified about it in the way only old dogs can be. Penny, eight, who approached every single day like it was personally designed for her entertainment. They both jumped into the Dawn like it was the best thing they had ever seen, bringing a chaos that sweet, steady Bruno had not had to deal with on his adventure. Penny's main concern was the prospect of another bed to nap on. Moose simply decided it suited him. And the three of them, somehow, found a way to fit right away. Three big Weimaraners in a small camper, sorting out the hierarchy of blankets and window views, and making it look easy.
All of June. All of July. Living outside as much as possible, sleeping in the camper, finding new places to explore. Moose made his home on the camping couch, dignified and unbothered, exactly where he was meant to be. Bruno led Penny astray chasing chipmunks and birds with the enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting his whole life for an accomplice. Penny, for her part, needed very little convincing.
I don't know how to explain dog joy to someone who hasn't lived inside it. It's not just happiness. It's a kind of complete presence. They didn't know what was coming. None of us did. We were just there, in the woods, in the Wyoming summer, in the particular gold light of a July afternoon with nowhere to be and nothing to lose.
That's the thing about the best seasons of your life. You usually don't know you're in one until it's over.
But I knew. Somewhere in the back of me, I knew. I'd lost my mom on February 9, 2021. I'd been back in July of 2021 for her celebration of life, just five months after losing her, but that visit was full of people and ceremony and the particular exhaustion of grief performed in public. Almost four years had passed since then. This was different. This was just the farm, and my stepdad, and the ordinary days that actually do the healing. And now here I was with these three dogs and this camper and my husband and the whole wide summer ahead of us.
I let myself feel it. The fullness of it. I made a choice that summer to be present: to put the phone down, to look up, to notice. The way the Wyoming light went gold in the late afternoon. The way Moose and Bruno would settle into the shade together like two old souls who had earned their rest. The way Penny could find joy in the same stick seventeen times in a row. The way a life lived outside, even imperfectly, even in a small camper packed with dogs and chaos, can crack you open in the best possible way.
We don't always get to know which moments we'll carry forever. But sometimes, if we're paying attention, we can feel them while they're still happening. That summer I was paying attention.
I'm so glad I was.
What came next would ask everything of me. But that summer, that golden, ridiculous, dog-filled summer, it gave me something to hold onto. And I held on tight.
Keep Moving,
Rachel
We love you ,Rachel. Grandma Kathy and Mr Frank