Sylvia's Journal

Coming home to a snowstorm is the best homecoming – as long as it starts after touchdown. We drove home from the airport in a light snow which turned into a veritable snowstorm sometime in the early hours of Monday, March 2. Everyone was advised to stay home, which we all happily did. I was grateful that our return from Amsterdam had not been today and wondered where the planes would be diverted to, if they left at all.

Back home I played with my new toy, a Kindle that had finally arrived and which should make packing reading material for my next trip so much easier – it can hold a 1000 books and the pages read like regular pages, not like a computer with a backlit screen. It’s an amazing technology that even allows switching from reading to ‘being read to’ if I were to get tired, with a choice of a male or female voice. I promptly started downloading multiple volumes of the Great Books of the world, all free of charge. That should keep me pleasantly occupied while waiting in airport lounges.

In the evening we went for dinner at the St. Johns as if it was just a regular day that had not started 8 hours earlier for me and about 6000 miles away. On the way to their front door I made a tumble on the ice that was hiding below a thin dusting of snow and managed to fall on my bad arm; the arm with the rotator cuff tendonitis that was already in bad shape from a wrong move as I pushed my suitcase out of my hotel room on Saturday night. I had iced it in the plane and it had finally calmed down and then the fall, requiring more ice and having Axel cut up my dinner.

When bedtime finally came around I barely noticed hitting the pillow. I woke up at my normal wake up time and resumed my life in the US, celebrating my safe return with breakfast in bed. We watched the mess on the roads on TV while sipping our Ethiopian coffee. Life is good!

The rest of the day I put away my travel gear, sorted through my emails and started organizing my next trip, three weeks from now to Ghana. The snowplow allowed for some diversion as did a call from my friend and former colleague Carol, the one who was supposed to meet my sister in Mali but didn’t – even though they flew back in the same plane. We had a lot of catching up to do – stories mostly about children and health.

Grand-dog Chicha loves snow storms, especially the aftermath, when looking for sticks in the deep snow makes it all the more exciting. When the snow melts we discover how excited she was when all the poops become visible that were so nicely dug under and covered up. Tessa and Steve then have to sweep the lawn with their poop removal implements while we watch and are glad it’s not our dog. Friends with grand children report similar sentiments.