Two weeks of getting ready for three days

The holiday was still two months away when she first asked. Not heavy, just a line dropped into a phone call: are you all coming home this time?

Her children and grandchildren all live far away. A few days a year is what they get — and she starts counting those days long before they arrive.

Two weeks before everyone came home, she had already washed the sleeping mats, cleared the room, stocked the dry goods. She asked a neighbour to drive her to the market for a particular kind of cake. Her youngest grandchild loved it — at five years old. He is twenty-two now. She never updated that, and maybe she never wanted to. In this house there is still a small child waiting to be fed.

For those three days she stood on the porch and smiled the whole time. Never once lay down for a nap. The hammock was hanging right there and she never got into it — sleep for what, she said, I'd rather look at them. It sounds like a happy line. It is really someone counting down in the middle of her happiest hours.

The day everyone left, she stood at the gate waving until the car was out of sight. Then she went inside, smoothed the mat flat again, stacked the pillows neatly. Not to put them away. To keep them ready. The calendar on the wall was flipped to the last month of the year, and one square was already circled.

She isn't waiting for a holiday. She's waiting for a car at the gate.

Three days is three days to you. To her it is two weeks of preparing, three days without sleep, and months of missing afterward. Next time you plan a trip home, what will you count it in?