Cycles

There’s dirt under my fingernails now as I type, and the children are fighting in the lounge. These are both good signs, actually—a huge step up from yesterday at this time. I’ve just come back from time at the new house, where Michael and I went painstakingly over our current hopes in preparation for his meeting with the dreaded architect tomorrow while I’m at work. After getting the plans settled, measuring and climbing and drawing on the walls, we went out to the back yard and weeded. It’s not a huge backyard, but it’s lush and tropical and grows weeds at an amazing rate. The children picked bouquets of little tiny wildflower weeds and searched for four-leafed clovers in the grass. I smelled a freesia—picked from my very own garden!—and sat in the sun.

It was a good week. The kids brought home spectacular report cards, and there was much celebration (Naomi wants you to know she got straight As, and Aidan wants you to know that his reading age is 7.6 years). And MG and her daughter over for Rosh Hashanah—our first in the new land. Michael and the kids found a lovely synagogue (while I stayed home and worked on my tenure stuff) and I braided and curled challah into the new year’s spiral. We all talked about years past and looked backwards and forwards, thinking about Michael’s family all gathered together without us, wondering when we’d sit around Laurie’s table at the holidays again. And, since MG is a US Jew, we talked about what it was like to have the harvest celebrations here in the spring, to be so far away from the things that we’ve known before. It wasn’t somber or unhappy, though—it was lovely, lots of good food and laughing and kids watching High School Musical 2 in the other room.

But it has been a truly horrible weekend. You know about the tenure deadline, and about Michael and Naomi getting this horrific stomach flu which had me in Naomi’s room at least once an hour for all of Friday night. We cancelled the dinner guests, dropped off the cake I had baked for MG’s birthday brunch, and I took care of all the sickies. Then, on Saturday afternoon, just as I was getting ready to give them their first solid food (plain pasta I was about to pour into boiling water), the wave hit me, and I stumbled to bed, hoping that Michael was well enough to take care of things now that I clearly wasn’t. Twelve hours of alternately sweating and freezing, feeling so sick that I thought death would be a big step up, and my sky began to clear, too.

So, walking the whole block away to the new house (which left me winded) and walking slowly through rooms I will come to know and love, looking out at the sea I’ll never know and always love, was a rather large improvement. It is foreign like mad here—I don’t recognize half of the plants in the overgrown garden, and I still think it’s bizarre that the walls are made of wood rather than plaster and lathe. But it’s also familiar and fantastic. I love to sit on the porch and hear the pounding of the sea, love to sit in the backyard and feel so sheltered and hidden. I can’t believe how fully surrounded I am by beauty, and in that house, there is beauty in every single direction. So, the tide comes and goes, the clouds race overhead, and sickness finds us and then passes away. Like the seasons, like the holidays, like life. L’shanah tovah to you all.