Possibly

It’s strange, how the most mundane household chores become benchmarks of adulthood.

I’m home alone for two weeks while various family members are in places of varying exoticness (ranging from Baltimore on the dull end to the Maldives on the “where is that again?” end). Without their presence, it would be so easy for me to slip into a housebound hermit act, neither going out nor doing anything.

But, somewhat to my surprise, I don’t. It snows, and I shovel the front walk (even though I don’t mind tramping through the snow, I’m sure the mailman appreciates it). I haul the fallen branches around to the back yard, where they’ll sit until I get around to cutting them up for firewood. I run the dishwasher and clean the oven and the sink.

I’ve never been in this situation before, alone in my parents’ house, but I suspect that pre-Tanzania I would have handled it rather poorly. And it’s only in this sort of oblique evidence of change and improvement that I am able to realize how much I grew while I was living alone in rural Africa. I’m comfortable being alone, now. I can improvise and tend to problems–why, just yesterday when a (not-too-important) part of the car fell off while I was driving, I simply tied it back on and drove home.