A hundred things I could tell you
You know you've been away a long time when you receive emails from friends that begin with lines like, "When you resurface . . .". In the last weeks, we traveled up through the Pacific Northwest and then spent some lovely time with my family. We were gone so long that the apartment felt strange when we got home, and we were all doing double takes trying to remember where basic things like the toilet paper were located.
We came home to major disruptions in nearly all our utilities, and spent our first week back getting our power, hot water, cable and internet all back up and running again. It's so strange to have a computer and an internet connection at my fingertips for the first time in what feels like ages.
I still have another month with the girls before they are back in the rhythm of school days and I am back to regular time in my studio, but I do have a few bits and pieces to share here in the meantime. I don't have many words these days, but am happily scanning photos from these last weeks and will share many of them in Photo Journey posts in the days ahead.
For today, I'll leave you with these lines from last week:
There are a hundred things I could tell you, if I had the energy to part these lips.
I would tell you about how our downstairs neighbors moved while we were away, their vacant apartment gutted.
How it feels like someone knocked a wall out of my heart every time I come in the door or down the stairs.
Even now I can't believe that this is my life without them, though our footprints in the construction dust don't let me forget.
I would tell you that my body is back in Brooklyn, though some part of me is still hovering somewhere over the plains of Nebraska.
That my memories of all that's transpired in these last weeks keep landing, one by one, like birds on the telephone wires.
I would tell you that words don't always carry the day, that things like presence and absence are are perhaps the most powerful of all.
I would say that some landscapes can mend you, that the ocean is an old and sacred witness, and that the journey gives us all the answers we need, in the end.