Summary: Candy realizes that some things do change.  Written for the March15th Pinecone Challenge, and expanded for inclusion here.  Prompt/lyrics: Thinking is the best way to travel. (Mike Pinder – Moody Blues)

Rating: K   Word count: 640

Scenes From Our Next Life Series:

Like You Were
Younger
A Good Life
Time and Change
Home
Warm Milk and Memories

Home

I wasn’t expecting any party.  I hadn’t mentioned my birthday—I never do—and I sure hadn’t ever told anybody named Cartwright the date.  You do that, and you get somethin’ like … well, a surprise party when you turn forty.  How they’d managed to figure it out I still have no idea (nobody’s talkin’), but I guess there’s no stoppin’ a Cartwright on a mission.

Time was when I’d have hated this kind of thing—the crowd, the attention.  At one time, I might even have just left them all standing there.  This, though, was not that time.  There was a pile of food on tables in the front yard, and it looked good.  I tipped my hat and grinned at the assembly—wasn’t as many as I’d first feared, mostly family and the boys from the bunkhouse, but I saw Roy and Clem too, and the doc, and a few others from town including Miss Ester May Bradshaw—and another cheer went up as I swung down and headed for the feast.  Joe clapped my shoulder as I passed.

“You’re late.  We were about to release the hoards, guest of honor or no.”

“Joe,” I shook my head, heaping on fried drumsticks and Hop Sing’s famous mashed potatoes, “a man can’t be late to a party he didn’t know about.”

He laughed, and fell in behind me.  More hands thumped me as I made my way down the table, and voices greeted me from all sides.  I knew every single person in that yard, and it occurred to me as I looked around for a seat that this was home.

This was home.

I had no plans to leave the Ponderosa again … and that didn’t even bother me any.  It was the first I realized it—the first time in a long while I’d even thought about my situation—and it should have been momentous for me.

I’m a drifter, and I’d never seen myself ending as anything else.

It wasn’t, though—momentous, that is.  It was like … well, it was like when Joe tells me something that don’t even need sayin’ (he does that, even after I’ve pointed out half a dozen times that I just ain’t stupid).  It was like somethin’ that’s just been for so long it don’t need thinkin’ about.  It was … well, anticlimactic.  (I got that word from a book—don’t tell Joe, because I’ll never hear the end of it, but it’s in my saddlebags right now.  I asked Adam not long after he came home how he’d enjoyed his years away, and he told me he’d decided that thinking was the best way to travel.  Then he started shoving books at me.  I’d never been a big reader, but … turns out some of them ain’t half bad.  It also turns out he’s maybe right.)

I wondered briefly how long I’d felt this way, and realized two things.  One, I didn’t know, and two, it wasn’t important anyway.

I leaned back into my chair, and waved at one of the boys I hadn’t seen for a while, and ate my birthday meal, and just watched them all.  Mr. Cartwright was tucked into a corner of the porch, probably hiding from the Widow Hawkins (who’d never been known to miss a party, invited or no).  Joe was talkin’ with Roy, handin’ up bits from his plate to little Maria on his shoulders.  Hop Sing and Lina were bickering cheerfully in some combination of English, Cantonese, and Spanish over whose dessert I was gonna like best.  Adam and Jamie were squared off in a game of horseshoes against Griff and Clem.

Home.  I’d never expected it … but it seems like I drifted right into it all the same.  I was forty, and this was family, and I was home.

Next story in the Scenes From Our Next Life series:

Warm Milk and Memories

Tags:  Birthday, Candy Canaday, Family