I got that joy, joy, joy, joy!

I don't know how it is where you are, but it's been crazy hot here lately. I think today I'll take one of our eggs up to the road and crack it open and see if it's hot enough to cook it. Just for the fun of it. I'm getting desperate...

Our chickens are sadly hilarious, walking around with their beaks open wide and their wings outspread. I'm thinking of giving them a bath, but that may not end well.

No rain in the last three weeks means the hose and I are spending way too much time together....dragging it around like a dead carcass, muttering what I wouldn't give for an irrigation system.

And the flower containers I joyously spent the springtime filling? Their cries for help send me scurrying outside into a wall of heat at least twice a day, moving them from place to place, hoping to hit on the right combination of sun and shade in an effort to keep them from giving up the ghost, and me from losing my sanity.

But what's a person to do?

On going home

Today is going to be tough.

I don’t like goodbyes.

What I like is the anticipation and excitement of a “hello”.

Yes, I know another hello will come after a goodbye, and you can’t get one without the other, but still you can’t convince me to like them anyway.

Tonight we fly home.

For eleven days now I have anticipated this moment...homesickness has been washing over me like waves on all the beaches we have visited recently...the gravitational pull for all I know and love growing stronger every day.

The only problem is, I know and love what I have here also.

My heart is divided, and no matter which way I look, it hurts.

We have been crazy busy. We haven’t stopped since the plane set down in CT eleven days ago. Non-stop memory-making has been our goal, and my body and mind and emotions tell me we have succeeded.

Now there isn’t anything left to do now but tie up loose ends here, get on the plane, and go home.

Home.

I was talking with someone the other day about home...about how wonderful it is to want to go home. To love your home. To have a home.

And then this person asked me, “But what about when you don’t want to go home...when you would rather not go home?”

And I stopped. And thought. And this weighty question has been heavy on my heart for days.

What then?