  Maybe once I leave Chicago I'll have more adventures. Most (though certainly not all) of my time here has revolved around various family activities, and being with my family skews my idea of an adventure. I saw an aunt yesterday who heard that I had left my job and said "I was just starting to think that you were settled and now here you go doing all sorts of other things!
" She and my uncle run the second generation of the Wunderink farm, and everyone already wonders who will take it over in the next generation. My grandparents live on the farm with my aunt and uncle, and when we visited this weekend I climbed up to the attic to get a fresh look at where I had slept as a kid.
There were the same twin beds with the same comforters I had used, which were the same beds and comforters my dad and his brothers used as kids. The farm has changed, even I can see it, but more slowly than the lives I see normally. If I had stayed longer, I'd want to ask my grandparents what they thought "an adventure" was. They raised 8 kids on a farm-- really, I imagine every day was an adventure. In comparison, mine feels a bit artificial.
But while I mostly describe these months as an adventure, there's a second component, which I've been soaking up for the last 10 days: making sure that I connect with my friends and family who live so far away, and whose lives are in such transition. It was important for me to be with my family when my sister left for Kazakhstan, just as it's important to see the farm now that I'm an adult (or more of one than years ago when I was last there).
It's also important to me to connect with friends who are getting married, starting school-- or even going through more subtle changes. 
