Returning at 2 am early Tuesday morning, 26 July, from a long weekend with family in Wisconsin, I am too travel-weary to do much more than open windows—the house closed up over the very hot five days of my absence was 87^o when I walked in.  I turn on the bedroom ac, shower, text of my safe arrival, and hit the hay.  Waking later, mid-morning, I go about repossessing the house, moving back outside plants brought in to prevent their cooking on the west-facing deck, restoring to their accustomed squirrel-proof Wild Birds system pole bird feeders brought inside as cautionary protection from the bear who brought them down two weeks ago.

I settle in the cool downstairs apse, and have my usual summer breakfast of cereal with fruit and iced coffee.  I’m immediately rewarded by the arrival of a male rose-breasted grosbeak, his formal tuxedo seemingly stained by the bright red blood of a slit throat, though his vigor at attacking the hanging suet cake belies any such trauma; this red bib is just part of his very cool outfit.  I unpack, sorting the clean clothes from the soiled, noting what was never worn, and examine my souvenirs:  whooping crane earrings made from cereal boxes and purchased on the sly as a gift from my niece and nephew at the International Crane Foundation, and my pragmatic purchases from the Amish-run Mishler’s Country Store in Dalton WI:  one cake of Fels-Naptha laundry soap and two delightfully fragrant bars of Australian Wavertree and London Lemongrass & Lemon Myrtle soap, a small scoop for flour or sugar (made in China), and a set of measuring cups (also made in China) with ergonomic handles.

It is good to be safely home, especially now the air is cooler, the weather more like the vaunted New England summer before global warming became so oppressively apparent.  I have missed some comforts of home:  morning coffee, omnipresent NPR, streaming The Old Man on Hulu, my bidet, and getting my sugar allowance in the form of cocktails, beer, or wine rather than the ice cream and sweets favored by my late husband’s family.

But I also feel the lack of what I found in Wisconsin:  the most comfortable bed ever, appointed with feather bed mattress topper and beautiful white trapunto spread and pillow covers; a spotless, beautifully furnished and efficient home layout; the company of a loving family (oh, to be in such good company now in my third year of solitary widowhood!); the generous, efficient, observant domesticity of two other women; the ongoing good-natured teasingly performative competition between two men of different generations; the relaxing pleasure of happily being not in charge, but instead following the lead of my hyper-capable and competent retired Army/Foreign Service nephew; the liberating hilarity of back-seat “chicas” struggling to buckle seat belts into receptacles exasperatingly located underneath the cheeks of the little woman in the middle; new, gently rolling landscapes of corn and crops of varying greens; new ways to be in the world; sandhill cranes; family stories:  histories filled in; tales of fences mended—and not; tales of what gets talked about–and what doesn’t.  Tolstoy got it wrong:  all happy families are not alike, nor is each unhappy family unhappy in its own way.  Somewhere in the spectrum from the Cleavers to the Simpsons, all families are unique.  I am lucky to be part of this one, and to have had the time we did together.

I am recombobulating and remembering all we did.  I will write it down to keep it.