Sand Through Fingers 1

When I was in 11th grade I boarded a Greyhound to Batavia, NY at 7:15 PM to go see a friend of mine I'd met the year before on a missions trip to Jamaica. My luggage, my suitcase, had my clothes, my new Bible, and my only photo album at the time, all the pictures that meant anything to me. I boarded, sat down, put my headphones on, and listened to the Sundays Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.

After 2 hours I took my headphones off and tried to sleep. Someone in the back was snoring so loud the entire bus could hear it while the woman in the seat across the aisle from me dug with her fingers into a can of Spam and threw her head back to toss the meat crumbs in her mouth. Some fell onto her blouse but she never noticed. She had facial hair on her chin. 13 hours later I arrived and my friend and her parents picked me up at the strip mall where the bus let out. The trip was awful. She was cold and seemed unhappy to see me. Her younger brother befriended me and we spent most the time I was there together. She and her brother fought when he called her a "bitch" for not treating her guest well. He took me snowboarding for the first and only time I've ever snowboarded.

We drove, on the last afternoon, for an hour and a half in the snow to her grandmother's house past farmland blanketed in white. Her grandmother doted on me and after lunch, myself and her family sat in the living room and while her parents talked I stared out the back sliding glass door into the field behind the house and watched the wet snow falling quietly. Three generations of that one family on Sunday afternoon, after church.

Her father and her brother drove me to the bus station the next morning and waited for the bus with me. 13 hours later I returned home. My luggage hadn't made it to the bus I had to transfer to in Buffalo, where I sat and and paid $.25 to watch tv on a television attached to the arm of the bus station chair. I lost every photograph I'd owned and my new Bible that had my name on it.