Coming home. Such joy. So many feels. The comforts. The familiarity. I woke up in my own bed with a cat nudging my arm. Thank you to a higher power, that I dare not describe for fear of missing something. You brought us to it. And you brought us through it.
Guess what guys! This story starts with keys again. But I cannot truly start there as I am sitting home in my chair, drinking my coffee with the windows and doors open. I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee in two weeks. I even switched fully to tea because that was so much easier to attain. Skip caffeine for those two weeks? How dare you.
The first thing I noticed was how wonderful if was to fill my coffee pot up with water from my tap. I just turned it on and sat there watching it fill. This is not something you can do in Ecuador. The tap water is not drinkable. We had plenty of bottled water and all was fine. But filling that coffee pot full of 12 cups of water was something else. I prayed, in that moment, to never take this for granted, knowing that I would before too long at all.
When we left it was too warm to even open the house in the mornings. Now it is cool and brisk. Right away, I notice things I brought back with me. My ears are more tuned to the birds. I checked out my Merlin app to see what was making all the racket in the back yard. Merlin is an app that will listen to the sound of the birds and ID them for you. I have a small start on a new love of birds and it’s one of the first things I noticed this morning post coffee and pain ointment.
Then I grabbed my keyboard and came to sit in my morning meditation spot, my chair. Oh how I love and missed this chair. My back is comfortable, my feet are up. The sun is streaming in one window, the breeze, birds and bugs in the other. The cat begging for more attention. The noise is different. I did not miss waking up to the Mindo dog sanctuary or the rooster this morning. But the cars are so loud. There is a airplane overhead, a crop-duster size. What a racket! But no rooster, and no dogs. That rooster started at 430am every day in Ecuador. The dogs went nuts when they were fed every morning and sporadically throughout the day. The rooster continued to crow long past dusk.
As I sit here, I am looking at the old clock on the table. It stopped running at 9:00. I can’t wait for it to pass 9:00 so I can wind it and get it ticking again, a constant reminder of my beloved mother. Since there is such excitement when going on vacation, especially to a place that has so many unknowns, I did not actively think, I am going to miss that clock. But now back at home, I cannot wait to get it going again.
Keys. God luck. When we arrived in Ecuador, maybe even before, I carelessly tossed my keys in my red suitcase. As we were packing to leave, I just happened to find them in that same suitcase front pocked where they had stayed for two weeks. With just a little care, I put them in my carryon pocket. As we landed in Kansas City at 1130pm, we were notified that one bag hadn’t made the full trip. It still didn’t occur to me that the car keys had miraculously moved from the suitcase to the carryon. Sure enough, it was my suitcase that hadn’t made the full trip and without that little stroke of god luck, the keys would have been somewhere between Miami and Kansas City.
It still didn’t occur to me until I asked Angela if I should ride the bus and go get the car while she waited for the bags. With my backpack on my back, I turned on a heel and headed for the bus, only to turn right back around to grab the keys. My face told the tale: I need the keys from my suitcase: the suitcase is not here yet: wait, they are in my backpack. I didn’t even remember which pocket I had put them in. I put the backpack on the ground and then my step tracing training kicked in. I found them with ease and a prayer of gratitude.
When we got home last night, as we were unloading the car, I asked Angela, how would we have even gotten in the house if we had taken an Uber last night? We both shrugged, too tired to laugh, and continued unloading the car.
Good morning, Lawrence, Kansas.
The Isms of the Ic 