Sylvia's Journal

Monday, September 17, 2007

Sometime in early August I was asked when I thought I would be ready to handle work again. I made a guess and said mid-September. That moment has now arrived and I believe that my guess was a good one. Today I feel alive and well enough to tackle work again. In preparation for this big day (which feels like a going-back-to-school-day) I reclaimed my office yesterday. It had been turned into a sick bay first (I spent my first three weeks at home sleeping there) and then became the spare bedroom and the place where we store things we don’t know what to do with.

I packed up the bottles of saline solution, gauzes and creams for wounds and lacerations that have completely healed now. You can still see where they were and they are still tender places, but they don’t need any special care anymore. We have come a long way.

I consolidated all the clean pots, dishes, trays, platters, and Glad- or Tupperware in or on which our meals of the last few weeks have arrived and thought about the owners of these objects and the wonderful meals they cooked and the company in which we ate those meals. I pushed Sita and Jim’s stuff out of the way and marveled at how they put their life in Amherst on hold to move in and take care of us.

I put a low table next to my desk chair so I can elevate my right foot while I sit at my desk, cleaned away papers that were no longer relevant. And then I sat there for awhile contemplating what would come next. I have never been out of work for 9 weeks and the projects I was busy on before the accident (the BU course, the work in Zanzibar and Tanzania) have come and gone or were handed over to others. Axel asked me how this back to work was going to happen. I told him that I would have a clean desk, a sharp pencil and a blank piece of paper and would be sitting waiting by the phone until work came in through a wire.

It will come in very quickly, said my colleague and friend Sarah Johnson, who drove up from Boston yesterday and took me to Quaker Meeting. She left the New York Times for Axel to keep him occupied while we were communing with higher powers. When we came back she harvested Swiss chart from the garden and then cooked a chart omelet served with fresh bagels. Sarah left mid afternoon after a wonderful visit, sitting by the Cove in the sun, catching up on what was happening in the office, all part of my preparations for my return. Sarah assured me there is plenty of work and it may gush in faster than I can handle. Of course I have no idea what I can handle but I am ready to explore this in the next few days.

The rest of the afternoon was a gift. We settled in the sheltered part of the yard, near our vegetable and flower garden, Axel in a chair, writing notes and me lying on the grass finishing another book, for hours. With a perfect blue sky and a warm sun, it was heavenly and only disturbed once by a big wet yellow dog that had strayed from the beach and wanted to play with me. I had no interest and he got the message quickly.

The St. Johns had signed up for dinner and we decided to make it a field trip to their house in Essex. We sat around the fire and contemplated, once more, all those good things that have come our way. We schemed about ways to make the intense experience of being part of a lively community a permanent part of our lives; if Axel and I were the first project of the new and expanded community, what would the next project be? It wouldn’t have to be a calamity like ours, but simply a part of the community, a family, a person with a need that, together, we could easily take care of. We have tested this oldest of concepts, communities coming to the rescue of their members, and we expect and hope that it will remain an essential part of our lives.