At 3 pm this afternoon, I sit down with a cup of coffee and leftover bits of a coffee cake from Mindy's in Chicago. I am home. I consider it my first moment of total exhale since... oh, I don't know when! Looking back on the past months, my head spins. From a winter of travel, to spring planting, to June travel, to July lily care, to the Poland trip in August, all culminating in Grandma Camp that officially ended today. Ed is still away sailing, the house is quiet. The chickens survived the lock-down (forced upon them for two days by my absence, in which they pooped up their water, their coop, basically everything), the cats? It remains to be seen. I've spotted three out of six since I've been back. Happily, Dance, my hands down favorite, not even close, and I dont care if that's not fair, is among them.
I have on the table a magazine that I picked up on one of my flights. I dont even remember which flight. It was free and it was about travel and it looked interesting and I haven't had time to look at it. My to do list before each of these trips, gardening sagas, and camp days just kept growing. Now it is all checked off, or at least no longer relevant.
All is quiet.
It's not that I thrive on quiet. For me, too much quiet is stressful! It means I haven't engaged with the world in a way that is important to me. It means I'm ailing, or unplugged, or in transition, or that I've given up. Still, I do greatly appreciate a period of quiet (I have three or four days of it in store) following months of being extra busy. I need it to think through all that just happened and what I have learned from it and how I should focus my attentions going forward. I need to review. I need to write.
But let me go back to the morning, which was lovely, and still in Chicago. It was a morning with my girls there (the dad had gone to work early, my daughter took the day off, my granddaughters were on vacation from school still).
(Juniper is very happy to have Primrose back!)
Just a couple of hours, but what wonderful hours they were!
We walked over to Mindy's -- a beloved bakery that really does have outstanding breakfast treats.
Equipped with those, and with coffee...
(one girl catches up on the financial outlook as I wait for my latte, the other couldn't care less about market prospects...)
... we hurry back home...
(come run with me!)
(okay!)
... and indulge!
And then the girls go off with their mom and I drive home.
As usual, the drive from Chicago to the farmette is sentimental and sweet in that it's always full of exquisite memories. Stepping into the lives of the young family in the big city allows me to see their everyday unfold and it is always a beautiful experience. Both my daughters navigate work and family life deftly, with total commitment and infinite patience. I just marvel at how much they must do each day and how they manage to maintain a smile through it all. Sure, I was once that busy, but I always felt that I was under-serving one job in favor of putting my energies into the other. When the girls were little, I was too often distracted at work. My mother helped a little with minding them when I was at the Law School, but it wasn't a perfect arrangement and so I cut out of school and work as much as I could to take over. (And then she left altogether to go to California, so we made do with my part time schedule and a rotation of summer sitters.) My daughters, on the other hand, don't shortchange their work, and they most certainly do not shortchange their families. Not even a little, at the corners. And they even manage to have occasional evenings of fun with their spouses. It is an amazing balancing act and it leaves me with such a sense of happy pride.
This is what I think about on the drive home.
I make good time today: no Chicago traffic and so I am in town a little after noon. I stop for groceries and then I speed back to the farmette to take stock of the animals. The garden will receive some attention tomorrow. Not today. I am happy that I took the time to straighten the farmhouse before leaving. The kids were so good at playing on their own that last morning, that everything is basically put away and I can do this -- sit back and exhale. And do a Zoom call with Bee. And answer emails that have been piling up.
And after dinner (which is a salad and a leftover pizza slice!) I pick up the magazine.
(only the flowers picked by the three Grandma campers remain...)
with so much love...
