Mom hugged me for about an hour. Not literally, but I guess you figured that out already.
- "I thought Jamie had forgotten something and was coming back to get it, but I was so surprised when I saw it was you!"
- "I got that from you screaming and storming out of the house to meet me." Mom was hanging her wet clothes on the clothesline in the garage. My bike gear was already hanging to dry, even though it didn't retain any water. Mom still insisted on hanging it. "Why are you hanging the clothes out here?"
- "Well I redid the laundry room a while back. Moved it out here where there was so much room to free up a little space in the house. But that's not important. Have you been here long?"
- "A couple of hours. I didn't want to wake you up, and then I met Jamie in the stables. Then I drove her home. We borrowed dads car since it was raining too much to use the bike." I pointed to the bike that was leaned against the wall and mom smiled. It was her worried smile. She prefered horses when it came to riding, which I found funny. A bike had never been as close to killing me as a horse had been, and still mom insisted on bikes being unsafe.
- "They let you haul your bike around on that plane?"
- "Nah... it's a rental. The gear is mine though."
- "Really, you should have woken me up as soon as you got here."
- "I probably couldn't have. Jamie tried to wake you when we didn't find the keys to the car, but you were out cold."
- "Well I guess you're right. She is, pardon the language, freakisly strong. If she couldn't wake me, nobody could."
- "I don't think strength has anything to do with waking someone up."
- "Well, you'd be wrong because it does in her case. She don't know how strong she is sometimes, so she can be kind of... rough..."
- "Now that you mention it, she did give me a good squeeze when she hugged me. My ribs are still sore."
- "I bet. Be glad that you were wearing that leather thing... It probably protected you from the worst of it." Mom was right. Sure, the suit was made with higher impacts than hugs in mind, but still, the padding would have absorbed very much of the force, and my ribs felt bruised.
- "She probably gets it from growing up with five brothers. I remember Daniel being kind of rough with the brothers. Perhaps she didn't get pardoned."
- "That might be it... but she is the only one of them who is THAT rough... Are you tired? I haven't made your bed yet."
- "No worries. I can make my own bed. I'm actually pretty beat now that you mention it."
- "Well off to bed then. There is plenty of time for us to catch up tomorrow."
- "I'll just grab a sandwich and then go to sleep."
- "Tish tosh. At least let me make you a sandwich while you make the bed." Tish tosh was something new, at least for my mom. I didn't argue with her though. I just went to my old room and made my bed. I was probably more tired then I realized because I fell asleep as soon as the bed was made. Didn't even have time to remove my clothes.

I didn't think much of it falling asleep, but waking up it struck me: My room was pretty much the same as when I left it. A really strange trip back in time on posters  and photos on the walls and in the closet. Mom had left the sandwhich in the room and it became breakfast instead of dinner. A sturdy piece of food. You couldn't find sandwhiches like these in the cities even if you tried. Basically a home made loaf cut in half like a sub with so much stuffing it was purely amazing, and all fresh and locally grown. No meat though, and looking at the walls I suddenly remembered that I was vegetarian when I left. We probably hadn't talked about my eating habits since then. It didn't really matter at all, but it made me think about what else we probably haven't talked about. It started to feel like I was frozen in moms head, no character development at all, and suddenly the room felt less nostalgic and more cramped. I made my way downstairs and out the door. I realized I must have slept like a log, it was probably early noon already and mom was nowhere to be found. The car was still in the garage though so she probably wasn't far away. There was something else parked in the garage though. A classic old motorbike. From a distance I could tell it was a Honda, the same model as my first bike. I hadn't seen one of those in ages, and I went up to it to have a look. There was no way to tell it was an old bike. Shining like new and it was almost sparkling even though it was parked in the shadow. A couple of dings and dents, but otherwise exactly as well taken care of as dads old car. Upon closer inspection I thought that a particular dent looked familiar. Right above the back wheel, a tiny imperfection in the frame. That would be the first scratch ever made on this bike, and I remembered it like it happened yesterday. I was so afraid dad would yell at me for being careless with it, my first dent on my first motorbike. Now it belonged to someone else and I could guess who.

- "However did you get your hands on my old bike?" It took me a while to find Jamie. She was with my mom and a team of girls who was learning to ride in a completely new training facility. Perhaps it wasn't so new as I discovered looking around. Wear and tear on the thing made it look like the building was about a decade old, so it probably got built soon after dads funeral.
- "Well... it got passed around town a couple of times before it ended up with Eric."
- "That's your youngest brother?" Not being too invested in her family and staying away for so long made it kind of hard to remember all her brothers.
- "That's right. He got Daniels dreams at a certain point and he bought the bike as a project. He wanted to fix it up and leave town, just like Daniel did... and you... But he never got that far. I guess I just took it over and fixed it right up. I even tried to paint it as close to the original colors as I could remember."
- "You didn't look it up on the Internet?"
- "Nah... I wanted to restore it from memory."
- "Well you did an amazing job."
- "I know right? It looks almost new... How did you know it was yours and not one of the same model?"
- "Jamie, I need you to take a couple of girls." mom interrupted. It wasn't my meaning to disrupt a lesson, but my urge to ask Jamie about the bike was so strong that I actually forgot that they were working. Jamie left before I could answer. I watched from the sidelines for a while as she and mom split the group of girls in two and proceeded to teach them how to behave around horses. It was a giddy group and they were young and anxious, so it must have been a beginners class. There were a couple of boys in the group, but they were outnumbered by far and kept a bit to themselves. I almost felt a bit sorry for them, but then I thought that it might be good for them to see a situation that wasn't dominated by males. Jamie was really sweet with all of them though. It reminded me a bit of me in a way... the way she and I used to talk and act back then when we first found each other. Perhaps I hade made a bigger impact than I could ever have thought... or perhaps I was just over thinking it. Maybe she was good with kids and it had nothing to do with me.

I wandered around the for me new building. I found that not only was there the huge hall with sawdust floors made for riding practice, but there was more stables in the same building. By the looks of it these were not for moms horses. There were signs that mom let people rent space to keep their horses here, and business must have been good because there were horses everywhere, and strangers tending them. But to them I was the stranger, and suddenly I felt a bit uncomfortable lurking around so I made my way back to moms house in hopes of finding a bit of piece. I walked into my old room and remembered that this space felt a bit claustrophobic at the moment. Countless hours I've spent in there, wishing myself away, and I did that again. The nice thing about being an adult is that I could just leave. I went into the garage and put on the bike suit, took my rental and went for a drive. This was a better memory. Riding around, not really having any place to go, but even this memory was a bit skewed. It was mostly the same feeling of freedom, but something was also fundementally different. I used to long to get away from this place all together. Now I had returned and I was older and wiser. The longing to get away was weaker, because I had been away and seen what was there. Now I wanted to see what was here. All over town were evidence of the time passing. Not just my mom had expanded her business, the whole town had grown. It started to look like a proper city block around main street. A couple of clothing stores even, and some cafes and restaurants. It wasn't the  tiny one little diner with the one little grocery store next to it, and the hardware store down the corner that I remembered anymore. The industry outside town had obviously bloomed even though the economy was generally bad. The mills were twice as large as I remembered them, and even the power plant seemed to have some add ons. And a couple of new blocks of recidential buildings. I felt a bit lost and strange so I decided to go outside of town to one of the lakes. I was glad that the town seemed to be doing well, even though it was a bit scary at the same time, that a place that I remembered as frozen could change so much.

There are a couple of lakes close to town, but the lake I wanted to visit was a couple of minutes further out. Nudist lake... There was a proper name on that lake but only maps said it. Everyone else called it Nudist lake, just because it was far enough from town so that not many people came here except those who wanted some privacy. I had never seen any nude people here though, so it seems it's just a name. It might be something someone came up with to tease the younger population, since the lake is a good deal uphill from town. You'd have to have amazing stamina to pedal your way up here on a bike, and it seemed like a perfect prank to pull on someone who is to young to drive. As I pulled up on the beach I suddenly realized that I wasn't sure why I'd come here. The lake was the same as always, quiet and solemn. But it might have been what I needed. Just to sit down and take in the one thing that felt exactly the same as it always had, sort my head out a bit. Many thoughts went around and I started thinking that a swim would do me good. Exercise is a nice way to calm your thoughts.