If you fill five bowel preparation prescriptions for a single patient in a three-month period, there is a fear on the patient’s part that that is the only way she will be remembered: incessantly chugging gallon-sized jars of laxative, all with Miralax for an appetizer and Ducolax for dessert. I have been working hard to leave a different impression on my seriously introverted pharmacist, all to the ends that he will not immediately think “bowels” when he sees me and that he will look at my shoes instead of his own while speaking with me.

Mission accomplished.

It began with a call two days after my birthday with a reminder to get a second shingles shot. Perhaps the only thing worse than the shot is shingles itself, so that night after Hot Pilates, still in workout clothes and probably smelling terrible, I drove with Chris to the pharmacy to get inoculated.

I went first, and the pharmacist held the syringe like a dart. It stung, and he yelled, “WHAT THE HELL?!,” and I smelled blood as he kept applying bandages. Thanks to fully warm and dilated blood vessels, my right arm looked like an explosion at the ketchup factory, and when I asked for gauze, he handed me a wad of three dozen squares. I stopped the bleeding with some pressure and then tended to the pharmacist, for he looked like he was having a very bad day. (He had not been wearing gloves, and I resisted the urge to tell him that the medications had rendered me asymptomatic, for that joke would have laid him out on the floor.) As recently as last week, he asked Chris if I was fine.

But so began the second half of my summer: unpredictable, freakish, slightly painful at times, and all together for my own good.

In late July my daughter finished her gap year working conservation. She had spent from May to November in Bozeman, Montana, and had left for Flagstaff, Arizona in mid-January. Ever since she left the second time around, we had talked about another road trip at the end of her stint. So for months I had planned to fly to Flagstaff, visit the Grand Canyon, and make a leisurely drive up through eastern California and down the Pacific Coast Highway, before hanging a giant left turn and driving home to Savannah — all over the course of a couple of weeks. After a lot of prodding from my daughter, and some complications from the appendectomy that needed to be weathered, I finally purchased my non-refundable one-way ticket to Flagstaff.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that travel plans invariably and dramatically change after the purchase of a non-refundable one-way ticket. There were earthquakes in California. My daughter hurt her back (uncomfortable, but not terrible). And about the time I was supposed to fly out, there had been a wildfire raging near Flagstaff, possibly necessitating an evacuation. Thanks to a blizzard a few months prior, her work schedule changed, and her time obligation had been extended. And there would be a boy who would be arriving at our house at a date and time certain. So instead of 14 days to drive cross-country, my daughter and I had four and one-half: Four and one-half days to drive from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Savannah, Georgia, a drive that at its most compact encompasses 1,955.8 miles.

So I bought a new non-refundable one-way ticket to Flagstaff. The schedule change allowed me to go to Chris’s family’s beach vacation for a few days, meaning I would fly out of the extremely small airport in New Bern, North Carolina. I carried a nylon bag — a Le Sportsac — that I had purchased from T.J. Maxx. And when the young TSA agent looked at it, he said, “I bet you got that in Paris.” With a new, slightly self-satisfied view of myself as the most cosmopolitan traveler flying out of New Bern, North Carolina that morning, I set off.

The three flights were mercifully unremarkable except in one respect. I am a notoriously cheap traveler, well-versed in Google flights, price alerts, and discount ticket brokers. So the fact that I blew $30 on an aisle seat on the Charlotte to Phoenix leg was a big deal. After I was settled into that seat, somehow having figured out how to buckle the seatbelt even without the safety briefing, I looked up to see a young woman, roughly my daughter’s age and wearing a Little Mermaid T-shirt, smiling at me and staring expectantly. “Pardon me,” she said. “I prefer the aisle seat.” I replied, “I do, too.” Then she stressed that she REALLY preferred the aisle seat, and I stressed that we had something in common, for I did, too. After she waited expectantly for a beat too long, she finally crawled past me and the hulking man in the middle seat to occupy her assigned window seat.

I felt incredibly old, for at that moment I was mentally railing at the entitlement of the young. (These thoughts included: How could she be so presumptive? Why was it okay to put me out? And — sadly, I’m serious about this one — had she no respect for her elders?) But then I caught sight of her arm as she closed the window shade and saw the six inch long row of neat and deep parallel scars on her left forearm. She was a cutter. And when I saw all of these physical manifestations of a deep-seated pain, I remembered how hard it could be to be young.

(I struggle here with whether to lie to you, but I will not. I did not reconsider my seat decision. So now you know the person I am.)

But I eventually landed in Flagstaff, and my daughter and I left about 24 hours later, and because I am her mother, I insisted that we see things along the way. With Google maps directing us to the Petrified Forest National Park, we hit Interstate 40, which largely runs along historic Route 66 — except when it does not. When we left the highway, like in the 20 miles it took us to drive to the national park, we saw the ruins of Route 66: salvage yards, abandoned gas stations, motels with names like The Buckaroo and The Wigwam (which had teepee-shaped cabins) and bearing signs that typically had only one word: CLEAN.

The Petrified Forest National Park was exceedingly hot, lightly populated, and unbelievably beautiful, with its expansive skies, painted-on clouds, unbearably bright light, and sweeping vistas. It was like a supermodel: I could take no bad photos.

All over the park are signs telling tourists not to take petrified wood. In a nice bit of synchronicity, I recently heard a podcast that referred to these very signs in this very national park: Apparently telling people not to steal petrified wood leads to an increase in the thefts of petrified wood. And honestly, it had not occurred to me that anyone would steal this stuff until I saw the signs. (While I was pretty hard-hearted about the aisle seat, I left all petrified wood in the park.)

We meandered through the park and returned to I-40, driving and hoping to avoid the rain. There were black bands on the horizon, and even in the near-desert, we saw standing water on the highway that reflected the deluge. We drove into New Mexico, where the hills look like the tops have been amputated and bear polka dots of scrubby bushes, and watched lightning pop both vertically and horizontally. There was a rainbow, and nightfall, and just a little rain, and then we were in Albuquerque.

It is funny when you feel very far from home and then find out that you are not. For when we checked into the hotel that night, the clerk looked at my driver’s license and asked if I had ever heard of a town called Metter. If you’re from southeast Georgia, there’s a single response to that question: Everybody knows it’s better in Metter. The clerk — who had only recently bid farewell to his 912 phone number — reminisced about growing up in Candler County and his boyhood trips to the big city of Savannah. After a few minutes the twang crept back into his voice and more of a twang entered mine.

The next morning I discovered that my beloved daughter had delivered a false assurance: Her boasting that all the conservation work had made her an early riser simply was not true. I occupied some time at Starbucks with my journal, and around 9 a.m., I practically threw her over my shoulder and placed her in the passenger seat of the little car. As my daughter dozed that morning, I could detect the peculiar sweet and sour smell of her childhood, and I tried not to cry. I wended through the mountains encircling Albuquerque and into the flats of eastern New Mexico toward the Texas panhandle.

A lot had changed in the year since we drove to Bozeman together and this year’s trip home from Flagstaff. Her gap year left her confident and free, and while I have often felt in the past like a solid D- in the strong-and-confident-woman department, she suffers from no such infirmities. She speaks her mind, and I like that. She knows what she wants, and I like that, too. After two decades of telling her, “I’m your mother, not your friend,” I began to hope that I could be both — a complicated source of advice and love, to be certain, but one coupled with a strong sense of companionship.

Last year was my own gap year, too, thanks to the diagnosis. I didn’t ask for cancer, but I would be a fool not to learn something from the experience. My perception of health is different, no longer confined just to the number of times I go to the gym every week. It now includes more sleep, daily mediation, and more time doing things I enjoy. To make that time, I started timing everything obsessively. I hated emptying the dishwasher, but after I found that it took exactly four minutes, I would do it and move on. I work much differently now: my day is governed by a to-do list. When I have checked everything off that list, I leave work — whether it’s 3 pm or 8 pm. It encourages me to focus and not to waste valuable time.

I paint more.

I sew more.

I knit more.

And at 51, I am starting to feel more like the person I am supposed to be. Creative. Adaptable. My own.

My daughter interrupted my reverie to make me listen to a podcast about the difficulties that women of color have with Euro-centric beauty ideals, a premise that didn’t surprise me given that I have had the same struggles, and then to play a travel playlist curated by a friend. As we listened and sang along, we drove through the miles of wind farms in the Texas panhandle, an alien sight if ever there were one. It probably didn’t help that we found ourselves in the midst of a convoy of government trucks driven by identical looking men with beards, ball caps, and aviator sunglasses. (I was reluctant to take a picture of them.)

We stopped at Cadillac Ranch, although the Bruce Springsteen song about it is far superior to the actual experience.

And only a few short miles from strip malls containing a Bed, Bath & Beyond and its ilk, we stopped at the second-largest canyon in America, conveniently located in a state park just outside Amarillo.

Unlike the Grand Canyon, the Not-So-Grand Canyon had a paved road going all the way down and back up. My daughter told me the rule of the Grand Canyon itself: going down is optional, coming up is mandatory. As she was talking, we interrupted a young man’s DIY modeling photo shoot on one of the trails, his wearing pressed jeans and a crisply laundered shirt, a silver belt buckle and black hat — and a stalk of alfalfa lightly clenched in his teeth.

And then we drove some more. My daughter flat-out told off a man who was bothering us at a McDonald’s in Shamrock, Texas; we spent the night in Elk City, Oklahoma; and then we drove straight through all of Oklahoma and Arkansas to Memphis. There was a stop at the National Civil Rights Museum.

There was a trip to Nashville to see my dad and stepmother, and a lunch in Atlanta with Chris’ parents. And then — finally and quickly and after almost 2,000 miles — there was home. Home is the best part of the road trip, for getting there safely is the goal, and it is the worst part of the road trip, for the adventure ends.

I suppose, though, a new adventure has begun for my daughter. She has started college, and after an indifferent stint as a high school student and a year of very hard physical labor, she is embracing her studies. She practically glows with happiness. She is sure of her place in the world. She met me last night in Atlanta, and I had one of the most enjoyable evenings of my life.

We first visited the aquarium, where we spent a lot of time admiring the otters. Since they are impossible to photograph well, I offer this jelly.

Before heading to a nice dinner, where we spoke of all sorts of Important Things, I asked if she would ride the Ferris Wheel with me. We were both a little scared, but we went nonetheless. Above the city with all the lights below, I took a photo of her, and she took a photo of me.

And while we both look a little nervous, I felt in that moment that things were completely fine. To be sure, the future may hold more hardship and not-so-welcome surprises, a certain lack of predictability and stability, more time spent up in the air, whether literally or figuratively. But it is all part of the adventure. The view up there was undeniably beautiful, and when I relaxed into it, I found that I could actually enjoy it.

I credit the gap year.

ALC