Small Pleasures

 I was walking peacefully up the creek, enjoying the early-March sunshine and shuffling my bare feet through the cool grass. My shoes were dangling from my fingertips and I carelessly let the legs of my frayed jeans brush the ground, becoming damp and dirty from the spots of mud left over from last night's downpour. The creek was teeming with life. I saw ducks bobbing in and out of the water and crawdads skittering on the creek-bed. Turtles swam beneath the surface, eyeing the water spiders skimming the water above, ready to strike their tasty meal. The tree branches, with few leaves, clattered together with the wind, giving the day a fresh and new atmosphere. The sun was shining in the bright blue sky, the birds were singing in the just-blooming treetops and everything was how it was supposed to be. At that moment, I thought the day was perfect, but then I looked in front of me and stopped dead in my tracks.

I brushed my bangs out of my eyes to make sure I was seeing right. I had to be going crazy, but I rubbed my eyes again and again, and sure enough, they had not failed me. There had to be some way that everything I saw was a hallucination, because there was no way it could be true.  I was seeing it, yet I couldn't believe it.

From where I was standing, I could easily view our gravel driveway that led up to the sturdy brick house in the woods. I could just make out the shape of an army-green Jeep pulling up to the garage door, then stopping.  Moments later, a man got out of the driver's seat and went to the keypad and entered the code, and apparently the correct one, because after a slight hesitation, the large metal door started heaving itself upward. All I could do was stand and stare, frozen in awe.

I self-consciously tugged at my shirt and wrapped my arms around me, bracing myself for what was about to come.  I pulled my hair back, then let it down again, purely to make my hands stop fidgeting.  The next thing I know, my heart was pounding and I burst into a run, but not just any run. A full-out sprint. I felt the cool air enter and leave my lungs. Every breath, every bounding leap I took, brought me closer to the man who had just entered the house. This man could only be one person, and I wasn't going to waste any time. I had to see him as quickly as possible and nothing could stand in my way. Nothing at all. I had been waiting for this moment for too long and I wasn't going to let anything ruin it for me.

All I could feel was my feet hitting the hard ground. I never even realized I had dropped my shoes when I started running until I felt the gravel of the driveway pierce my heel. I kept on running, first into the cool garage, then into the welcoming kitchen of the house, ignoring the blood that had to be pouring out of the hole in the bottom of my foot, but not taking the time to examine the wound.

I slammed the door to the garage behind me and stopped. Just stopped, because right in front of me was a man I had been dying to see for almost three years, a man I had once thought dead. My brother had come home. My big brother, the one I had always been so proud of, had come home from Afghanistan at last. At last, he was home safe and sound. We no longer had to worry about bombings, ambushes or even friendly fire.  He came home.

Standing in the doorway, I breathed heavy and didn't say anything, even though I had rehearsed what I was going to say in this moment millions of times in my head. Every night, when I went to bed for the past three years, I practiced exactly what I was going to do and say when my brother came home.  If my brother came home.  Now all I could do, though, was breathe heavily and stare at him.  All my previously rehearsed monologues left my mind completely.

He looked smaller than he used to; shorter and older than I remembered. He carried a single duffle bag, but he dropped it as soon as he saw me, standing in the threshold of the kitchen. He didn't smile and lift me onto his shoulders like I had always imagined he would when he came home from war, making it seem just like the old days, but slowly came up to me and gathered me in a hug. I buried my head in his shoulder and he held me close. I couldn't hear him crying, but I felt his shoulders heave up and down with silent sobs, as did mine. My brother was home at last. At this moment in time, I realized this was the best day of my life, and all the other moments of the day were merely small pleasures.