Monday, March 4th, Santa Rosa, California

Greetings!

Few experiences are more satisfying time and again then coming home from a long trip away.   Sleeping in your own bed after 20 hours of buses and airports and planes is so good.  Especially if your bed is he kind that no hotel used by tours would ever afford.   Supporting every one of the shifting curves in each of our bodies without disturbing the other, long deep sleep just came not a moment too soon. 

Awakening to a neighborhood of friend’s morning walks, and driving off to work, our welcome greetings signal a return to normalcy in a community we love.  The box of mail our postperson brought to our doorstep bore invitations to re-emerge from controlled privacy.  Slowly, we walk back into a familiar routine which better supports our bodies, and eases our pace of change. 

Unpacking to either the washer/dryer or the pile of latest art acquisitions in search of locations, we take an inventory of the trip’s experiences and decisions.  Which clothes to replace, purchases to store, and memories to set into the back locations?  Comparing now available research, did we really visit the right places, have the best experiences, and learn the most we could?  And are really that much tanner and slimmer than we left?  Do our Panama (actually they’re usually made in Ecuador) hats make us look as cool as we think, and how much will we wear them?   When will we stop greeting and thanking people in Spanish? 

Refilling the hummingbird feeder, and sprinkling the pond with fish food, we’re welcomed back by those friends.  I notice that hungry blue jays are busy sorting through rain-gutter snared oak tree twigs, and helping reduce my often-postponed, precariously-perched, roof cleaning days.   My shout-out to them is only tempered by a wish they wouldn’t also drop twig-bomblets from the oak trees over the hot-tub while I’m in it.   But I guess my dodging is a small price to pay.

Catching up on the radio news, reversing vacation holds, and contemplating watching the many hundreds of hours of taped favorite series episodes our digital video recorder captured, we decide we’re back.  It was a wonderful 38 days which greatly expanded our sense of many different peoples, and brought us lots of new friends.  Now, we begin to integrate it all into what the rest of 2013 brings us.

Gregory and Pat