As January came to a close we left our rental in Bath and made our way down to Canterbury. I remember thinking we’ll probably never be back here, and feeling a sadness in that. But it was more the fact we’d never be back to that time in our lives: three months in the UK roadtripping about, when all of us were young.

It was just a few hours to Canterbury in that used German car we’d bought back in October and now driven through several countries, hauled innumerable things. Though we’d donated garbage bags full of clothes along the way we were still packed to the gills. I’d stowed a few bottles of Scotch from our month in Scotland. As dry January came to a close it got easier knowing I’d soon be able to start drinking again. The hardest time was the very beginning when abstinence created a stress that could only be allayed by the thing I could not have.

A sunny, nothing day when we crossed the Strait of Dover for Calais. It was some strange-named town in northern France where we got a table and an 8 o’clock dinner reservation that I broke my dry January spell with a bottle of sparkling white, and felt nearly hallucinatory back at the hotel. Didn’t take more than a few hours before we were home to my mom’s in Germany the next day, and the pattern resumed.

Then in February my wife and I had a getaway for just the two of us to Berlin, the first time we’d been alone without the kids in months. My grandmother had a stroke and I flew back to the States, the longest I’d ever been out of the country. Early 2016 and all the TV screens in the customs area had images of Trump. He wasn’t even president yet. I got the flu and read 1984 in a fevered state. Our kids returned to German school and didn’t learn a damned thing. But it gave them structure, and we all need that.

Fast forward a year and I was back at work, doing my first contract with Microsoft. Another year and I was leaving it for an agency job. By 2019 I’d left the agency and returned to Microsoft. A year later, and I went back to the agency for another five years.

I plod along the streets in our neighborhood in the early morning dark using night vision, never a lamp, to see. It feels like I’m walking in a dream but my feet know the way. Each time it’s the same with familiar streaks in the sky as it goes pale and the stars fade. And day by day the light changes and I think about what’s next, and where I’ve been.

The rain came back in the early morning hours while we were still in bed, that familiar dripping sound just outside our window. Now all the frost will melt into the lawns and the leaves on the shrubs will look glossy again. The sun sets after 5 now, and the whole process is more drawn out with color in the sky well afterwards. You have to love January for the progress it makes distancing itself from winter, though it’s really just begun.

Now with the rain back it smells like the Pacific Northwest again with the wet cedar and pines. I am in the car driving on the wrong side of the road with the kids in the back and my wife beside me taking a last look in the rear view mirror at a small cottage in some strange town where we stayed one January in the UK. We could go back if we wanted to but it would never be the same.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, pacific northwest, travel