Homing

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I stand, unsteadily, balanced unhappily-upright on my two feet under a steady stream of hot water. Even the shower can’t thaw out the bronchial infection, the tortured sinus passages and the throbbing where my cerebrum used to live.

I feel thick, ponderous and vacant all at once.

Outdoors, the sun is shining hot and fierce, blazing away under cloudless skies… I squint through swollen eyes, running clumsy fingers through shaggy hair and a smile breaks through a face made of glass.

It’s good to be home.

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It’s been a long few weeks. This trip started out in San Francisco, a week-long intensive conference for work. From San Francisco, I travelled north to Seattle for the better part of three days, then on to the Olympic Peninsula. For family.

Yeah. You read that correctly. Not mountaineering, not a sea kayaking adventure… Family. Capitalized. Italicized. Underlined. No quotation marks, though… this was the real thing. Three generations of stubborn Germans managed to somehow co-exist, breathe each other’s air and live to tell the tale.

There were moments of breathtaking beauty, moments of raw anxiety.

There were sunsets over the water (and a couple of breakaway treks into the snow covered peaks of the alpine world above).

There were tears and gales of laughter, four sisters reunited in celebration of my youngest sister’s birthday- for the first time in eighteen years.

Good things. Heavy things. Things to share, things to hold in silence for years to come.

It's good to be Home.



East Sequim Bay at sunset,
taken from the front porch of our cottage
at  Sunset Marine Resort

  
*Homing is the process of determining the location of something, sometimes the source of a transmission, and going to it.