Sylvia's Journal

I finished my writing assignment at 5 minutes after 5PM. It was a long haul on a very hot and muggy day. It is the first draft only. I will have another week to write improve on it when I come back from South Africa. That trip starts the day after tomorrow. I have to shift my focus to that assignment and will do so during the very long trip from Boston to Atlanta to Johannesburg.

But first I am going to focus on tomorrow. Tomorrow is July 14 – it will be five years since we fell out of the sky, a black day that was otherwise a New England 10+ day. It was also a Saturday. We now know what will and what will not get better. For me this knowledge (that some things – ankle/arm – won’t get better) is fairly recent– for Axel it is old news (brain/arm). Although we will have to get used to living with some degree of handicap, living at all remains rather miraculous.

We declined to go to the ’14 juillet’ party that we were supposed to attend five years ago. We could just imagine the conversation and didn’t want any part of that. Instead we are going to a ‘diner blanc’ with tons of other people in Gloucester; my first time, Axel’s second. I watched this picture of this event last year, all homesick and wishing I could have been there. Now I will be.

We will join 7 other friends for this fest that was invented some 25 years ago in Paris. It is a sort of pop-up dinner party where everyone is dressed in white and brings in everything that they need for dinner (tables, chairs, plates, silverware, tablecloth, decorations, candles and of course food) and when all is consumed they pack everything up leaving nothing behind.