Home for Christmas

As many of you may well know this last December was my first time to be home for Christmas since I joined the Marines 5 years ago. However oddly enough upon my departing Botswana I felt nothing but remorse. You see I’ve never really been much of a social butterfly and it’s always been hard for me to find large groups of people I could actually connect with, now granted I can make friends with pretty much anyone, anywhere, just like anyone else who can keep an open mind and travels extensively. However I never usually connect with a large group and end up normally finding one or two good friends to pass the time with. So it was quite to my surprise when I show up in a little city of 100,000 or so in Africa and find a plethora of people with common personalities and interests to my own. If you have the right friends anywhere on earth can feel like home.
So anyways upon arriving at the airport in Grand Junction I felt a bit relieved to be done traveling and to only have lost one bag in route which I knew to be somewhere between Atlanta and Denver and was looking forward to some snow and cool air (the one thing I never really adjusted to in Africa was the heat lol). My mom picked me up at the airport and at our very first stop for gas (this is after I left the airport on the wrong side of the road lol) I almost immediately felt like an outsider. I quickly came to realize I would spend the next month as a tourist in the same small town (1500 people or so) that I had been born and raised in. But I was back with my family and was going to see them all for the first time in 5 years. My younger brother Gunther still lives and works in the area as a coal miner (you can’t really knock it he makes over 50,000 a year at the age of 21 in an area where most people are lucky to break 25,000) so we met up earlier on in the week. However our video game rehab sessions(he had torn a ligament in his thumb dirt biking and had to play as much Xbox as possible to rehab the thumb and get back off of workman’s comp lol) soon ended when my little sister and baby brother returned home. My sister(TR) is living in Cheyenne, Wyoming with her husband who is an Air Force police officer and trying to make the most of it, and my youngest brother(BJ) is also wasting a bit of his time in the Marines out in 29 Palms, California as an explosives technician.
So the remainder of the time went by pretty uneventfully. My grandmother came down to join us and managed to scare both my brother and mom into not smoking anymore (she resembles the grim reaper in a white flowery hospital gown lol). And we all had a nice Christmas dinner together for the first time in 5 years. We spent the majority of our time out and about due to my mom’s trailer being about 450 square feet with 6 people 3 dogs and a cat. And once the daily festivities were done we all retreated back to our appropriate borrowed residence for the night (TR was staying with her husbands family, Gunther has his own house in the next town and I stayed with my friends family up the road from my moms). After the week of Christmas my family all departed back their normal lives which left me to finally get to spend some time with my best friend and her family who were kind enough to essentially adopt me for the rest of my time at home. I went up and did some snowboarding both with BJ and with Brie her family and then threw in some snowmobiling for good measure, as well as did a nice little road trip to meet up with some friends of Brie’s from college that I had always heard a ton about but never met and who turned out to be two very nice women. We rounded out our time at home(brie’s going back to DC on her way to Turkey) by gathering together as many people as we could find from our class in high school. We ended up finding 9 people (pretty good when you consider my graduating class had about 45 people total) and all meeting up to catch up over a few drinks at a local bar. Which turned out to be a really interesting experiment into how much people change and mature (or in a few cases don’t change or mature lol) after high school. But all in all it was really fun night and it was really nice to catch up with everyone.