Leaving Philadelphia at 9 am on 31 May as the temperature climbed to 96^o, I arrived back home in Madbury NH to 55^o temperatures at 5 pm, three years to the day since the final hours spent with my darling husband David.  I awoke alone this morning to the silence of a house with only one resident sleeper, a change from nearly three past weeks of travel and visits, reminded of that 1 June 2019 with David so recently gone, his absence so raw and still present.  We moved into this house over Memorial Day weekend in 2001; he left it exactly 18 years later.  I am looking for patterns.

When I got home last evening, I first filled the bird feeder with seed, the suet basket with a fresh cake, and the hummingbird font with sugar water, unpacked the car, poured a glass of wine, and surveyed changes in the yard and garden since I’d left on Friday, 13 May.  The grass needs mowing and the last of the daffodils are long gone.  I’ve missed the lilacs entirely.  The rhododendrons are blooming, at least where the deer haven’t cropped them; there, bright new green foliage has sprouted.  Ditto the azaleas, most of their blossoms similarly ravaged.  The Solomon’s Seals dispatched by deer have allowed the hostas they previously shaded to emerge—including one that most certainly I never planted, now growing across a path, uphill from its fellows, under a pine.  How did it get there?

My return home unscathed after so many miles, so much traffic, and the koyaanisquatsi of I-95 (How is it we continue to survive the George Washington bridge approach?) seems no less than miraculous, the revelations of travel and reunions with close friends now distant in time and space rendered rich and strange.  I propose, Dear Reader, to consider it all here, in posts of peripatetic epiphanies.  Looking for patterns, and now more than halfway through my 69^th year, taking stock seems not only a good idea, but a necessity.

My Southern Sojourn:

19 days

2728 miles

13 states + D.C.

21 friends

3 family

2 mass shootings (rising to national—however brief—attention)