I have an entry about my last night on the island, started on Sunday morning before my boat left, but it is long and there is a lot left to write on it, so I’m saving the draft and just letting you know that I’ve arrived safely. By the time I made it to Los Angeles on Monday night, I had gone 96 hrs without more than an hour of sleep, and had passed through three countries in one day. Se was there to greet me at the airport, and took me to Ontario to meet Jenn and Karl. So I had friends and love to see me off at the boat, and friends and love greeting me on the other end. I am truly blessed.
My mother is doing as well as can be expected – her organs are failing, but she is alert and still moving about the house, taking tea and cigarettes on the deck, reading novels in her armchair during the day. She has a new regimen of pain relief that reduces the variety of drugs she was on, and so the jaundice is improving a little. Within an hour of getting home, she asked me “How are you doing with all this, honey?” and I told her honestly that I felt very lucky to be here, that it all seems sort of blessed and I’m grateful for it. That if she and I hadn’t had a few visits together last year on our own, with no sickness hanging over it, that I would be a guiltridden wreck for all the time lost.
She apologized to me for calling me back from school, and I reminded her that the only way she’d been able to convince me to go back in the first place was with the knowledge that I could come back at any time if things got dire. Then I told her that I knew I’d be coming back soon, and told her about the dreams I’d had. I started to cry. She hugged me, and I felt better, and realized that already, only an hour into being home, I’d said all the things I was afraid I wouldn’t get a chance to say.
When we hiked in Levkes a few weeks ago, we stopped under a myrtle tree growing near a stream. I took a branch and left an offering of chocolate under the tree, stuck it in my camera bag, and promptly forgot about it. Yesterday as I was taking my camera bag out, the branch brushed my fingertips and I took it out and remembered the sound of the stream, the sunlight glinting off the water, the murmur of the students voices all over the hillside as we lay in the sun.