Home, bowl, closed borders.

Vince is back in town! He flew home on Saturday and Jeremy picked him up on Sat night and he texted this photo of them to me. The first night back, he gave us hugs and we briefly watched a youtube video (our usual before-bed ritual) and he headed out into the night to see his friends returning at 4 or 5 in the morning. Then he got up on Sunday at 10 am to make (virtual) orientation at his summer job (which he found out only at 3 am the night before while hanging out with his friends eating lasagne because one of them was like – ugh, I gotta get up tomorrow to go to my job training at 10 and then Vince was like, let me figure out when my job training and opened an email and said – omg, I have to go to my job training tomorrow at 10 too!). He’s working at the same JCC camp that Edda is going to and that he went to when he was about 8 years old. He’s a bit on the older side for a camp counselor, most counselors are high school kids, so Vince is a “senior” camp counselor with 3 high schoolers as his “junior” staff and then 10 kids who are third or fourth graders. He slowly realized yesterday that maybe he wasn’t only in charge of kids, but maybe also “in charge” of the high schoolers as well? Anyways, a new experience for him. Very different from the boy scout experience he has. It’s a joy to have him back. I never went back home for longer than a couple of weeks after I left for college, so I know Vince doesn’t have to come back. mmmm, the house has a teenage boy smell now.

The morning of Vince’s flight, Jeremy was making oatmeal in Jeremy’s favorite bowl. It turns out that it’s also Vince’s favorite bowl and when the two are living together, it’s always a little bit of a fight who gets to use the bowl and if it’s clean or dirty or if it’s hidden somewhere in a room, so Jeremy was looking forward to this back and forth bowl ritual. (I have no interest in the bowl. It also turns out (I had forgotten) that this was the bowl that Jeremy bought for our wedding to serve whipped cream cheese in for the brunch. We had a brunch wedding.) He was gingerly moving it from one place to another and it slipped out of his hands and broke and then he was heartbroken. It turns out it’s really hard to console a heartbroken Jeremy before he’s had his morning cup of coffee. We are trying to find a good replacement. A Pier One bowl from circa 1998.

After rejoicing that Germany had taken the US off the “at risk” Covid country list and relaxing into thinking Jeremy had a break from work and that he’d get to see his parents and I ordered a whole week of Hello Fresh in anticipation of me cooking dinner for a week, we spent some time reading and rereading the travel restrictions and it seems like the borders might be still closed to vaccinated US citizens. It’s a bit weird that on a Tuesday, we aren’t sure if he’s going on Friday, but that is where we are.