I’ve Been Away

When a rooted person like the one I have willingly become is uprooted every so often to travel to unfamiliar places, the water, the air, the soil taste and smell and feel unfamiliar to us, different than our native ground–and there is a kind of transplant shock.

So it is out of that kind of mild travel-trauma that I write my morning pages this morning–our first morning rising from our own bed, to our own desks, books, coffee cups, computers and stacks of mail, with the family dog in place at last where she belongs, a kenneled victim of transplant shock perhaps more drastic than our own.

Travel changes the traveler. The tourist, not so much. Travel moves more than bodies through space, across map inches. Travel is to force yourself outside of that comfortable, anchored, hidebound way of you see the same old world in the same old way. This is why “travel abroad” is a common component of a “complete education” for students who can afford it. I would have had more of it. Now, a little will suffice.

So what has changed, other than the grass growing six inches green and thick outside the back door?

Time was that, on an occasion such as this, I’d have debriefed my trip in plain view and no small detail, expounding my disappointments, pleasant surprises, here-there now-then comparisons and motel-restaurant reviews.

But one of the lessons of being away is to know once more that the world does not wait for you to return. And the world is not waiting anxiously to hear my reflections on a tiny change of orbit. The planets remain aligned somehow, even after our odometer shows 1800 miles of uprootedness.

So instead, I’ll return to my regular showcase of insects, wildflowers, garden and gardening snippets and grampa tales. But I’ve been away. And I might yet find occasion to make you watch my gulf-coast slideshow on the wall.

[su_highlight background=”#eadbab”]IMAGE: an unidentified “white” thistle common along the Gulf Coast. It was an especially difficult time for flower photography while we were in the Deepest South because the storm winds blew constantly. For many in MS and AL, the winds caused a bit more than a photographic nuisance this week.[/su_highlight]