So I came home the other day, and my totally wonderful host mother informed me that she needed to give my roommate and me bed making lessons. Yeah, bed making lessons, as in lessons dealing with how to arrange sheets and blankets on our beds after we wake up, because she was concerned all the blankets would fall off our beds and we would freeze to death during the night. How very . . . normal.
Because, in the end, the old lesson surfaces again and you see once more: it’s the little things that have meaning. Hanging out in the hundred degree computer room with a smelly fridge, chatting about anything from schoolwork to pets, sitting in a rented room eating a turkey sandwich for the first time in months in the heart of a hill, jumping between buildings because you forgot your umbrella again, dashing down the center of the road with a group of other students at midnight, spending dinner sharing threats with your host brother about plots to stab and or shoot each other, walking past the man who plays violin for pennies on the street, or heading off to class with five other people, none of whom have more than a vague, general idea of where you’re going. These are the things that will be remembered, the anecdotes told and retold at dinners throughout the years, the things that have meaning, perhaps only to you, but still meaning, more than the towering cathedrals, the breakthroughs in painting depth, the miracle working Madonnas. These are the real miracles – that twenty-five students from a dozen schools could bond in a month, that you can’t imagine a time when you did not know them, that you can’t even comprehend leaving this place. The memory of yesterday, perfection of today, horror of tomorrow, moments between the breathtaking . . . This is what matters.
