A quiet late night

I just read an email from our international move coordinator, Rainier Overseas Moving, telling me that our container arrived today, sailed through Customs, and will be delivered Wednesday, July 2. I was just getting used to living a Spartan life, with one furnished bedroom and one furnished eat-in kitchen. But, as the late great George Carlin might say, my 'stuff' is coming home.

It is a little after midnight. It's a moonless night, there is no sound but the kitty water fountain burbling away and the refrigerator humming. I am sitting by an open window, it is cool out...though we are expecting a build-up of heat coming tomorrow.

Angel asked me today...or was it yesterday?...if I had thought I would be so happy about being home. My instant reply was YES. I think I knew in October of last year that my time in Italy was limited. There were just too many problems with where we lived, and the Euro was just too strong to continue to support. My biggest clue came that October at the beginning of only our second trip home in the time we were away, when we were leaving Newark Airport, had cruised onto Route 80 West, and I innocently said, I could kiss the ground, I am so glad to be home.

WELL! Angel did not react well to that honest remark. After all, I was the Queen Mary who had set sail for Italy in 2005 with the intention of never looking back.

We got through that moment of clarity. I think it started us both talking much more honestly to each other about how we really felt about daily life in Italy.

Mornings here in Long Valley we awake with the birds, to the quiet, the blessed quiet. We're up early, have our cereal and coffee, and then out in the garden to work on claiming the flower beds back from the weeds, moving mulch, putting in new plants, puttering. Angel said to me, as I was attacking some particularly tangled root systems of persistent weeds, 'The little girl loves playing in the sand'. And that's me...playing in the sand. I have dedicated garden clothes that could stand on their own after two days. I love it.