The Day After Tomorrow . . .

. . . and no, I'm not referencing the movie.

Have you noticed the countdown on my sidebar?  Sometime today it will turn over to one day and a few hours.  My boy will be home on Wednesday.

Remember when his countdown chart looked like this?

Well, this is what it looks like today.

Each dot lovingly applied by me every day for 728 days now.  Seven HUNDRED twenty-eight days.  Two years.  How could it have been that long?

Now there are only two spaces left.

We received a package on Saturday from NYC.  It is a battered box, inscribed by many different hands whose labels have all been scratched out so that the post office could get this special box to me. It barely survived its three-thousand-mile journey intact--splitting tape, torn cardboard, illegible address.

Inside it are books.  Books my missionary son has carted around with him for two years.  Reference books like Jesus the Christ and Preach My Gospel.  Spanish books like a conversion dictionary and word conjugation lists.  Notebooks (I had forgotten how much he loves spiral notebooks) filled with his words and his thoughts and his schedules.

These books have been part of my son every day for the last two years--when I couldn't be with him.  As I opened the box and carefully lifted out his precious books, I could almost feel him in the room next to me, part of his mission coming alive to me through his penned words on sheets of paper.

Evie and Hyrum removed the three small photo albums from the top of the opened box and they have carried them around for the past two days, laughing at the pictures and asking me what we were doing when each picture had been taken.

You see, every six months or so, I would go through my pictures and send fifty or so to Tucker, just so he could keep up a little on what we were doing at home.  Looking through the pictures, I see how much of our lives he's missed.

And that just reminds me how much of his life I've missed in return.

Wednesday May 15.  2:30 pm.

The end.  I can't believe it's over.