Sylvia's Journal

I am writing this morning in my bed like the old days. This time I have a lap desk that Axel gave me for Christmas. It came with a long and beautiful poem about writing in bed and his waking up to the tap-tap-tap of my keyboarding. I am writing in bed because Tessa’s friend Roy is sleeping downstairs in my office which still has a bed in it.

The sky is winter blue and the sun is shining on Axel’s sleeping face. From where I sit I can see a few scattered patches of snow that survived yesterday’s rain in the yard of our neighbor Jackie. It looks like a great day for flying to Gardner.

I was supposed to have flown yesterday but the cloud ceiling was too low, 600 ft. Without an instrument rating I was not allowed up in the air. Instead I waited at the flight center with a bunch of other folks who were all hoping the fog would burn off quickly, as predicted in the forecast. I met David from Uganda who knows the US better than any of us because he drives a tractor-trailer and delivers goods all up and down the Interstates. He converts everything he earns into flight hours and has more ratings under his belt than I ever aspire to have. Once day he will go back to Africa or any other continent to fly commercially; According to David this is the place to learn to fly, especially the Northeast with its packed airways and variable weather.

Finally I gave up waiting for the skies to clear. Armed with a brand new navigation map to plan my trp to Gardner and a stylish Piper jacket that Arne gave me, I left to do some shopping. When I came out of the grocery store the skies were mostly blue. I did not return to the flight center but hurried home to get Axel to his massage appointment.

Axel woke up in terrible pain yesterday morning. I had not seen him suffer this much for a long time. It seems that anything that immobilizes his body for awhile (sitting in a car, standing up at a party) creates a terrible backlash for him, quite literally. He was able to get an appointment at the local massage place at the end of the day. He stretched and stretched until he ran out of energy and then withdrew with a book. When I got to Masconomo Street he had already started his walk downtown. I could see from the way he walked that every step was murder. We exchanged places and he drove the rest of the way downtown while I walked back home. It was my longest walk yet. I even tried a slow jog, no more than a 100 yards which left me huffing and puffing for the remainder of the walk home.

Back home I started to plan for my trip to Gardner. It took awhile to get the hang of cross-county planning again after all this time. I am excited about the trip but also happy I am not flying alone; I m not quite ready for that. When that was done I continued sewing the two baby quilts from scraps that were leftover from Sita’s two enormous quilts she made for Christmas for Tessa and me.

Roy, Steve and Tessa returned from visiting friends and cooked us a taco dinner, bickering in the kitchen about whether to add ketchup to the hamburger meat or not. Tessa got her way (with ketchup) because that’s what her dad always does. I listened in amazement at how strong her conviction was about this, and how equally strong Roy’s and Steve’s convictions were that this was not the right way. I think she won because they were on her territory. But it got me thinking about clashing cultures. I never mentioned that I was brought up eating spaghetti with ketchup instead of tomato sauce and thought that this was the right way to eat spaghetti. I had no idea.