Them

My family moved back to the Upper Valley tonight.

I saw them all a week ago, and so they weren’t new as they climbed off the bus, a family of only six right now instead of nine. I forgot that the friends waiting for them with me hadn’t seen them for almost a year.

It was strange, waiting at the bus station to pick up my family, piling them and all their luggage into our cars, and driving them to dinner and then to a hotel. It was equally weird leaving them at the hotel and driving back to what has become my house. I was a little disconcerted, while I washed the dishes at home, to think that in about another week I will be moving back in with my family and giving up the freedom of only taking care of myself that I’ve grown so used to, and to find that I was a little apprehensive about that.

What was strangest of all, though, was thinking of my family as “them” instead of “us”.

Their collective experiences this past year are very different than my individual ones, and because of that for the first time I feel a little like an outsider. They don’t know how I spend my days, or who the people I talk with my friends about are. They weren’t the ones I told when my car refused to start again last night. But neither do I know their friends, or their daily routines, or what happened to them yesterday. Strangest of all, I don’t get their jokes anymore. For the first time in my life, when my sisters look at each other, say something in unison, and then laugh uproariously, I don’t understand.

I don’t know what to think about that.