Sylvia's Journal

My vivid dreams vanished much like a spider net disappears when you walk into it. The only thing I remember is that my friend and colleague Cary Perry was in it. This is not surprising since I just discovered last night that her network overlaps with mine in yet another way. We had already discovered that she is connected to our children’s school network (in several ways), and the old Manchester network but now I discovered she is also connected to my organization behavior teaching society network, something that is not local at all (but the connection is of course always local). In an exchange about this new connection Cary wrote me that I am at the epicenter. I think not; for me she is at the epicenter. The thing is we are all at our own epicenter but many people don’t know it (as we did not). We can only hope some people discover this joyous fact without having to have an accident.

Much about these last three months has been about discovery. This was possible because we were going slow (standing still at times). When you slow down you can see more of the landscape. Trains are slower than jet planes, cars slower than trains, bikes slower than cars, walking slower than biking and lying in a hospital bed or sitting in a wheelchair is as slow as you can get. That is when our journey of discoveries began. I discovered the rhythm of ebb and flood as the cove filled and emptied itself. I am not sure I have ever seen the whole sequence in one single day. And while I was watching people shared with me their stories about broken bones and broken hearts and I discovered how much we have in common.

Through the EMDR therapy I discovered past traumas that my mind and body had hidden from sight; and then I started sharing those with my siblings, one by one and I discovered things I did not know about them or events that I had tucked away or entirely missed; much like they discovered things they had missed; hurts and feelings that I am still carrying with me as baggage.

But most important of all discoveries was what the Xhosa and Zulu people from South Africa have known from the beginning of times. It is called Ubuntu and it means a person is a person through (other) persons (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu). Our forebears probably knew this also but somewhere along the way (in our planes, trains and cars) we lost this piece of wisdom. And it took our fall out of the sky to retrieve it. Might this be the lever Archimedes talks about?

Yesterday Axel had an EMG (Electromyography) which is the electrical recording of muscle activity. It took an hour and a half. I was his ride so I got to watch. I had had something like this done to diagnose my carpal tunnel syndrome (which vanished after the crash) and remember it as slightly uncomfortable. But this looked much worse and the doctor also stuck a thin needle into his muscle while I watched waves on a computer screen and sounds as if we were deep down on the ocean floor. The news was mixed and not much of a surprise: he has serious injuries in his left arm and it will take a long time (a very long ‘awhile’) for this to be fixed. There was some good news about his sensory nerve down at his wrist which was more active than expected. Although it is not clear what the nature of the blockage is the doctor assured us that nerves are quite good at bypassing blockages. However, considering all the work that is taking place inside his arm and the rest of his body, the nerves will need time, lots of it, do re-route themselves. So the recommended treatment is good sleep, patience, hope, much physical and occupational therapy to keep the muscles strong and active and avoidance of anything that contains neurotoxins (like alcohol). So please help him with that. He had just gone back to savoring a real beer or glass of wine. Nurse Sita and Sylvia are on high alert and watched over him like hawks when Ken and Carroll came over with and for dinner. He was good!

Progress is being noticed on both the foot and neck/shoulder front by my physical therapist and I can’t help but think that the acupuncture set something in motion. Ever since last Friday’s session there has been a lot of activity around the tender places, some of it quite intense.

From one day to another there about 100 to 150 hits on our Caringbridge site. “Did you know you had that so people in your community?” asked Gary last night. ‘No,’ said Axel, ‘we had not realized that.’ We actually never had thought of ourselves as embedded in a community. But we are and we know it now.

I remember Axel complaining some years ago that our social life paled in comparison to that of others. I did not quite understand him then and I think he will never ask that question again. It had something to do with having parties at other people’s houses, with invitations and all that. My preference has always been the last minute call about a dinner, something like ‘we have some terrific this or that, would you like to join us?’ Or us getting on the phone, ‘it is a beautiful evening at Lobster Cove, come join us’; or even better, ‘the tide is right, come pick some mussels.’ The last one is more of an order. We did not do this a lot, but frequently enough. Food and company and good conversation…these are intimately linked.

The first month after our accident we were engulfed by our community. I liked it while Axel was at times overwhelmed. He had been in the hospital for over a month and I think that made a difference. For me it was like the loose strands that made up the web of people we know, got tightened by the care and concern that each brought to us as soon as they heard of our plight. This web had lots of thin threads and loose ends flapping in the wind. But with each call, email, card, meal, ride and the accompanying conversation this loose network fashioned itself into a tight and beautifully patterned web. And still, to this day, people enter from the fringes and want to be part of this.

This, our rescue community, may well have become something of an archetypal community, like the old village. All that the villagers need to thrive is right there. The food is grown, then cooked, then consumed right there. The smith, the doctor, the midwife, the negotiator, the warrior, the farmer and the baker contribute what the village needs. Everything is there when it is needed.

We are not sure how it happened but we know it has something to do with permanence and being rooted in the same place for a long time. It has something to do with living in the town where one grew up, where the policeman was a classmate; it is about being married to the same person for a long time and being included each others’ networks; it is also about kids going to a small school that emphasized community and made sometimes reluctant parents work together on complex tasks and discover the joy of each others’ company. It is about sending out deep roots and holding on. We know how lucky we are that we got all this. I am not sure we ever realized how very rich we were.

The community certainly kicked in again yesterday with visits from MSH colleagues Mary O’Neil and Edith Maes and her husband Rutger, and more food than we can handle. As per the Airset schedule Peggy showed up with a very complete meal, including cake, cookies and drinks. A couple of hours later Fatou showed up. She had decided not to call me first expecting to be refered to the calendar and that would get too complicated; so instead she cooked what I think was a very complicated four course dinner and dropped it off. We gave our visitors large take out dishes and forced them to help themselves. What a deal, you come for a visit (and were forbidden to bring food) and then return with a bag of food. And then we had enough to invite Gary and Christine to finish the rest (there were still leftovers even after Jim and Sita joined). Since we were still working on leftovers from Friday we think the food program can come to an end, now that we can shop, harvest and cook ourselves again and with a freezer still full of parked meals.

During our first days in the hospital the big news was that we would all fully recover but that it would take awhile. The only part of ‘awhile’ that we could envision at the time were two endless months, a time for the bones to heal and get back home. The days and weeks went slowly at first and then everything started to accelerate to this week where major milestones were accomplished (more on that later). We have completed the first phase of the period called ‘awhile.’ That we accomplished it we know from X-rays, scans, doctors and people’s reactions (“Wow, you two look great!”). If you were to see us standing still and from an angle that would obscure Axel’s scar, we look entirely normal. But we feel far from normal because there is still much we can’t do and much that hurts.

The next phase of ‘awhile’ is going to be much longer; we are talking about 6 to 10 months. It is a very stretched out ‘awhile’ that will require amounts of patience that far exceed what we needed to muster so far. Our bodies can do laundry and cleaning but our muscles, tendons and ligaments are still traumatized and they protest when we act a little bit too normal; and the nerves, well, they aren’t even in the picture yet.

Before the crash I never thought much about range of motion, or real feeling in some parts of our bodies. Now we are both keenly aware of what’s missing. It’s sad that you have to lose something in order to appreciate what you had. Luckily, we are told none of our losses are going to be permanent. This promise sustains us and makes us look around at the things we do have, and appreciate them wile we still have them. And we certainly know, experientially, that nothing is forever and things can change on a dime. Horace has been telling us this for centuries with his Carpe Diem.

More freedoms again on Saturday. This truly was the most spectacular week in terms of milestones; the week in which we turned the most corners: Tuesday: Axel’s brace off; Thursday: my boot off; Friday: driving again and Saturday: flying again.

The flying part was a bit sneaky on Arne’s part. I had gone to the flight center to deliver the last of the replacement headsets. I made sure the new plane was on the ground so I could touch it (click on the photo tab of Caringbridge and you’ll see me and my new plane). I even climbed into the plane and sat at the controls, with no intent to go flying. But when I went back into the office Arne suggested we go for a little spin over Essex County and circle over our house, check out the big cruise ship in Gloucester harbor and do some fish spotting over Salem harbor. It was a glorious day and I consented on the condition that I’d be a passenger, not pilot; I took the right seat, a place I had never sat in before, to show that I was serious about not piloting myself. Of course Arne had different plans and later I regretted I took the right seat. He did have me take off and cruise and when it was time to return and land, he demonstrably folded his arms and left the controls to me. But I was in the wrong seat and everything was reversed. Getting ready for landing made me break out into a cold sweat. I gave the controls back to Arne and he landed us safely. It is now very clear that I need to do some serious work on landings, both in my EMDR sessions and with a flight instructor.
But the exciting part is that I flew again, and that I know that my body can handle the mechanics without strain or pain. I was a glorious fall day, and I knew why I went flying in the first place.

Back home it was exercise time again and the rest of the afternoon we prepared our toasts/roasts for Andrew, who celebrated his 60th birthday. His birthday party in Essex’s lovely shipbuilding museum was wonderful. We saw many old friends and everyone marveled at our ‘normalcy.’ I wore jewelry and a skirt for the first time; it was our first real party, with music, dancing and lots of people. Unfortunately we could not participate in the contra dancing, something I would have loved to do. Such things will have to wait ‘awhile.’

Saturdays are still important milestone days because our lives changed on a Saturday. Like a baby’s age in its first half year, we still count in weeks. Today we have reached the 11 week mark and this moment has become a milestone of sorts. With a brief pause every morning, as I write before I leave my bed, the weekly pause is not all that different, just the view a bit bigger. We have come such a long way!

My therapy session also became a stock-taking session. Ruth reviewed what I had wanted to work on when we started out, five weeks ago. At that time I was still reliving my failed attempt at landing and my body would react in a way I could not control. A windsock was a trigger for an emotional reaction and I could not bear to think how Axel was carried out of the plane wreck. All that seems far away now. I can acknowledge every piece of the experience without getting all obsessed, teary or uptight about it. The EMDR therapy did its good work already in addition to raking loose some other insights that are helpful to me.

We had breakfast with our night nurse David. He arrives late the evening before and gets up early to cook us breakfast and take Axel to his appointment. Since we can get ourselves into and out of bed now, David’s presence as a night nurse is redundant but as a friend we’ve decided to keep him on. So he will continue this tradition for awhile longer. His little dog She-Ra gets to spend the morning in the bunny pen and have the illusion of chasing chipmunks. Of course knowing that she is penned in, the chipmunks now tease her and all the animals are having fun.

Sita’s has started to nag Axel (and I sometimes chime in) once an hour to do his exercises with his hand and arm. On Thursday he finally complied. She even had him set his watch to make hourly beeps. The impact was swift and total: his occupational therapist complimented him on Friday morning. The results were clearly visible.

After OT Axel went to a memorial service in town. He was dressed in suit, dress shirt, tie and real shoes. Putting it on was not easy (nor was taking it off later in the day) and required assistance. He looked very smart and not at all like the trauma patient from just a month ago. He got to see many friends and acquaintances but realized he is not quite ready to stand in a reception line as long as he did. He paid dearly for that the rest of the day and the night with various back and neck aches. Nevertheless, he would not have missed the event. We are learning that pillows and chairs need to come along on his public appearances. Woody brought him home and hung out with him while I was enjoying my new found car freedom and drove myself to my appointments.

I have added a new dimension to my recovery with acupuncture. My first session was quite remarkable compared to my previous acupuncture experiences. With needles in place, lying on my back in a dark room, it felt like I was poked all over with a cattle prod in a rather sloppy way, with sparks careening through my entire body. The activity at my right ankle and shoulder was particularly intense. At one point my right and left ankle seemed to be in conversation, “Hey, how are things streaming at your side?” “Oh all is hunky dory here, but your side looks rather taut and swollen, what’s amiss?” It is this image of the two sides talking that made me smile and made the pain bearable, the body healing itself. At the end of the session I felt like a variation on the truck that had driven over me. Now it felt like a truck had driven through me.

We had a quiet dinner cooked by Sita and Axel. After dinner we all got busy: I took a bath to soothe my aching body, Axel returned to his exercises and Sita resumed working on her gigantic drawing assignment that is spread out all over the living room floor.

Later Chris and Jay came back from Boston with Jim. Jay is a new pilot like me and we talked for a long time about flying. It was wonderful to talk about flying again. My dreams were full of it that night.

More freedom yesterday. My orthopod released me from my booth. And better, he told me from now on I get to decide whatever I want to do. Yes, he really said that (so I had ice cream AND chocolate after dinner). The really big development is that I drove the car. Not my Bluebaru (it went to Canada with Tessa) but the silver one with the oil leaks and a thousand other costly defects. The one we had signed over to Jim, thinking at the time we would never drive again. At least it felt that way. But yesterday, at the end of week 11 post-crash I drove the car into town to the supermarket. I shopped all by myself (‘please put the heavy stuff in the left bag and keep the right bag real light’), and then brought the goodies home. You cannot imagine the sense of freedom and power. I no longer have to ask someone to get me something. I can get it myself. I also can drive myself to nearby appointments, and will start doing so today.

I had offered to drive Axel to Salem in the evening to get his scan but Sita would not let me. She wants me to drive only short distances for now. “What if your foot gets tired and you cannot brake in time?” The last thing we want is another crash. But my foot did not get tired driving into Manchester and back. It was a remarkable and exhilarating experience.

It took Axel most of yesterday, some real serious pain meds and stretches once an hour to get through his pain. Abi’s expert massage set him off on the right path and the day ended OK. His third night of freedom was, as he told me cheerily this morning, “a hundred percent improvement.” We have both had our experiences with these occasional bad days and/or nights and we are learning that ‘biting through’ gets us to the end which invariably arrives, sooner or later.

My massage has moved out of the light post trauma touch into deep and hard muscle work. There are a thousands knots in my body and Abi has set to work to get them out.
My office, aside from being the sickroom before Axel got home, now also serves as the massage room and occasionally as the exercise room. But most of the time it is my office again and real work is getting done there. I ‘attended’ MSH’s quarterly staff meeting via webinar with colleagues from around the world. It is such an amazing thing that we can be together while so far apart. Working from Manchester-by-the-Sea is not a big deal when you have colleagues who work from Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nicaragua, Ghana, Malawi and many other places. Just another person calling in from an exotic place!

We planted grass on the dead spot where the ramp had been just in time before the rains arrived. Today, for the first time in weeks we cannot see the Cove out of our window, or the reflection of the rising sun on the Putnam’s windows. It will be a day for indoor chores and work. I am slowly rearranging the house into its former self, returning stuff to where it came from or throwing it out.

Last night I got busy reassembling my flight bag. I have replaced the headsets that belonged to the Beverly Flight Center which I had borrowed on that fateful day. I have been busy bidding on them on E-bay. Axel and Jim, on their way to Salem Hospital for Axel’s scan picked up the third headset, which will be my own, from an E-bay seller who happens to live in Salem. I am still missing items from my flight bag and I am rather obsessed with getting it to be ‘just like it was.’ Clearly, with the driving, something else is coming into view, my first flight.

Axel’s first night of freedom, and for that matter his second, was not so great. They consisted of short bouts of sleeping interrupted by long periods of worry and discomfort. The first night he was very anxious about making unauthorized moves. It is funny how we are afraid to hurt our bodies when it is our body that hurts us. When my leg was first released from its cast I was afraid the healed break would not hold, even though I had seen the X-ray showing the bones had grown nicely back together. I only have to look at the picture of the plane wreck to assure myself that our bodies are a tough bunch. It is the rest of us that is frail and vulnerable.

Very early this morning I found Axel up and moving his wedge and some of his pillows back onto his side of the bed. We had a somewhat sleepy conversation about what was going on. He was searching for ‘the right position,’ he told me, “I am just not used to moving like this anymore. I try to sleep on my side but my bones have not been stacked like this. It feels funny and every move hurts.” Suffice to say, freedom hurts and is not quite what it is cracked up to be. I bet the Iraqis feel that way too.

Yesterday morning Sita and I went to Beverly Hospital to get an X-ray of my cervical spine. My stiff neck has thus far been treated only with ultrasound and soft tissue massage. The PT wants to make sure the fractures were healed properly before she starts with mobilization exercises. It sounds ominous. As for the painful right upper arm, its condition has a name now: rotator cuff tendonitis. I thought I was doing good pushing through the pain when doing my shoulder and upper arm exercises. As it turned out I had been irritating the tendon. So for my ankle the pain is part of extending my range of motion. I have to grin and bear it; for the arm pain is bad and to be avoided.

Wayne Bennett came around lunch to take Axel to his OT appointment and returned him when I was on my way to PT. This is very much what our days are like and it is going to be worse when PT gets added to Axel’s OT roster.

I had my first banking and shopping experience since the crash. Combine that with the wheelchair being returned, the ramps gone, me doing the laundry, vacuuming, cooking and some work in front of my computer, and you’d think it was an ordinary day. Life is getting increasingly ordinary, which means busy. The days are flying by.

For dinner Axel was whisked away by Lark Madden for a ‘Boys Night Out.’ They went to a local restaurant with an interesting menu and both ordered venison. I am sure their meal was accompanied by a good glass of wine. Sita, Jim and I had a meal from the garden: potatoes and green beans enriched by leftover chicken and ice cream for desert, while we watched D-Day and the folly of war on TV. My eyes zoomed in on planes, pilots and too many crashes. I wished Ken Burns had finished his WWII documentary before we went to war in Iraq. It might have changed the course of history.

Axel’s body brace is off. Against a background of angels singing hallelujah, he stepped out of his brace and walked. I had secretly hoped that this would happen but had not dared to express this hope out of fear to jinx the visit. Axel’ previous visit to this same doctor had been canceled at the last minute, and postponed for three weeks. We had all been a bit worried that this would happen again.

He and Sita came to pick me up at the PT office and when I walked out Axel stood there waiting for me without his brace. I didn’t notice it at first but then noticed how Sita had placed the brace quite prominently on the hood of her car. It was hard to miss. We had our first big hug without plastic in between. There were a few tears.

Axel’s experience of his new found freedom was wonderful to watch and contagious. As soon as we got home we rushed up to the bedroom and pulled out real clothes. Off with those pajama pants! And when the jeans were on and the belt buckled he finally had proof that he had indeed lost weight, a few holes on the belt.

In the doctor’s office Sita and Axel were taken on a 3-D picture tour of Axel’s spine and understood that the fractures were on the front of his spine (better) and not as bad as we had understood. He can do pretty much anything he wants except picking up heavy cement bags. Back home he promptly picked up a cast iron Hibachi and got chided by both his women. But he did cook the dinner and walked around with a grin on his face and a real beer in his hand, sometimes even moving it to his limp-wristed hand. He still walks a bit as if he has a brace on and we expect a new PT regimen that will require hard work, more trips to Peabody and a doubling of exercises.

Everything else that happened yesterday pales in comparison to this glorious ending of this already glorious day. It was a quiet day filled with exercises and work. I put in some more hours of work, and am now working on two projects which are both manageable and fun to do.

At night we dismantled Axel’s side of the bed; we took away the wedge and most of the pillows and Sita helped Axel adjust to lying down flat with only a pillow or two. He looked a bit anxious as he tried to get comfy in this new position. We left in the small hand railing that helps him to pull himself up into a sitting position. The dinky little thing cost us 130 dollars so we might as well keep using it. With the hedge of pillows gone I can actually kiss him goodnight without it becoming a mountaineering expedition.

We haven’t talked yet about how he experienced his first night without being pinned to his bed. He did not wake me or Sita up crying to have his wedge back. We turned a big corner yesterday. The brace was left by the front door to spend the night outside. It could become a cache-pot. We could easily fit two geraniums inside it. But my preference is to throw it out.

As soon as I wake up I put pillows in my back, one on my lap to serve as a computer desk and start writing. The computer is on standby on my nightstand. Usually I start with my journal but this morning I wanted to make sure I wrote down whatever I remembered from my dreams before they would go poof. From the dreams I remember only incomplete scenes; at least they appear incomplete in my wakeful state but I recognize the themes instantly: something about a fire, about going the wrong direction and about a strong woman. But there are also elements I don’t recognize and don’t know what to do with (blackness, ice, and dead bees). As words they evoke images of dread and doom but the feelings that accompanied them in my dreams had no such negative load and so the obvious interpretation is more complicated than that. I store them for now in my dream journal; maybe the images will be helpful one day in the future, or to feed a nascent poem. I may take them to my next EMDR session.

I have tried to record whatever I remember from my dreams for about 30 years now and some have become very clear from the distance of years while others stayed opaque and a few turned out to be predictive. It is amazing how much work gets done during the night by our minds. It is as if mine never shuts off. During the day the limbs and extremities are busy, but the night is exercise time for the mind.

An extraordinary feature of our existence the last 10 weeks is that we could not take anything for granted anymore and our senses were sharpened, even as pain and nerve problems dulled some parts of our bodies. There was no boredom ever; living as a survivor of a plane crash makes everything new. This must explain the vivid dreams and the activity of my brain at night; while I sleep my mind is like the road crews in the big city at night, digging up broken pipes, repaving roads, moving snow or garbage, fixing stuff they cannot get to during the day because of all the traffic. At night my mind is like that, reliving experiences, relaying neural tracks, reconnecting images or feelings dredged up from the far recesses of my life’s archives and bringing multiple paths together to form brand new round-abouts. Ruth and I are spending much time at these new round-abouts during our weekly sessions. And we are marveling at all the traffic there.

Yesterday was a full day for both of us. Axel went to his physical terrorist in the morning driven there by the guys from next door who have started to organize their shopping trips around Axel’s OT sessions. They have become weekly outings and they seem to have a great time together, helping Axel forget his pain on the way back.

I put in about a third of a workday reviewing and sharpening the draft of a publication spearheaded by my colleague Lourdes who lives in Mexico. We talked on the phone and I have a (self-imposed) deliverable for Friday: a next draft of the 23 page paper on coaching. I sit at my computer writing with my right leg on a pile of pillows on a table. I have to be careful not to twist the rest of my body because that would create more work for the physical therapist who is already spending much time on teaching various muscles, tendons and ligaments to act normal again.

Axel and I had our very first really good fight yesterday, with sound effects, and storming out of room action (which is much more dramatic when the storming is of the slow hobbling kind and you can slam only one fist down on the counter instead of two). Sita watched us but, wise child that she is, did not say a word. We made up in about 15 minutes and things calmed down enough to pick up our exercises again.

Sita took me to PT and when she came to get me one hour later she had a plan. We picked Jim up who needed a break from some very challenging work that involves Excel spreadsheets (Liz Lewis may expect a call soon) and took us to the mall, where she treated herself to a big new screen for her computer to facilitate a new assignment that requires a gigantic illustration. I took advantage of the opportunity and stocked up on chocolate.

We ate half of the duck, finished the lasagna and will be working on the remaining lobsters and duck today. We may even get to some of our frozen dinners tonight, rediscovering things in the refrigerator we had forgotten about. We are doing well: eating well, sleeping well and getting better.

We have just started our 11th post-crash week. It will be an important week because Axel will see the spine doctor tomorrow. We expect he will order an X-ray and then make some pronouncement on this state of his compression fractures, and thus answer our most burning question, how much longer the brace?

I will see my ankle doctor later this week and hope to be freed of my boot. I have already cheated a bit and walked around without it, against doctor’s orders, but it’s too hard to keep that foot packed up when it wants to move on its own. The wheelchair, the crutches, the cane, the walker, and soon the commode are pushed into out-of-the-way areas in our house. I am not quite ready to return them or hang them up in the attic but some of these devices have not been used in weeks, some not in days. The exercises are beginning to show their effect. Axel is becoming more of a two-handed person although eating a lobster last night was still a bit beyond his reach.

Yesterday started quietly (with Quaker meeting) and slowly build up to a rumble and then to a grand finale towards the end of the day. It was a day full of surprises. Sula and Jacek visited Axel and established themselves on the point so they could better see the various WWII planes that flew overhead from their temporary weekend base at Beverly Airport. WWII, or any other old airplanes have a bit the same effect as bluefish and stripers running after the baitfish, they get all the guys in the neighborhood out of their houses. I also look at planes but a different set of synapses are fired. I go for the cute little new planes, without turrets for gunners or bays for bombs.

Alison Ellis, our dear Cape Cod adventurist and discoverer, showed up at the end of the morning with an extravagant brunch which we set out on the picnic table. Having tired ourselves on eating as much of the food as we could, we all settled into hammocks, comfy chairs and beds and napped or read for a couple of hours while the day continued to be a ten plus New England fall day. I sat with Ann Lasman for awhile who had come to dig out the remaining potatoes from our garden. After a harvest of a couple of pounds she decided to let the still healthy potato plants live a little longer and produce more of the small potatoes that was the reason for planting potatoes in the first place. We talked about gardens and made a plan for planting some asparagus crowns before the winter. It is an old wish but I have never gotten around to it. This is a good time to plan for asparagus in the spring of 2009.

I joined the nappers and readers after Ann left and was about to finish another book when suddenly everything changed. First Arne from the Flight School showed up with a cooler filled with lobsters. He gave us eight which we gratefully accepted (it was meant to be leftover night) and put down on the kitchen floor for some entertainment. Then Fatou arrived, coming in from China town, with a friend and a Chinese duck (all cooked and ready to eat, the duck, not the friend). The duck had its head and feet still in place, especially for Sita, to remind her of Shanghai. And just for the fun of it, Axel grossed her out by nibbling on these parts. We settled into an ever widening circle of friends as more expected and unexpected visitors joined. Martin Imm stopped by after his sail out of Manchester harbor and disassembled with Jim the front ramp that had been so lovingly built by Joe Sterling nearly two months ago. Another step back to normal: a normal entrance to the house. We are still holding on to the back ramp for a bit longer, even though we don’t need it now that the wheelchair has been retired from service.

And then arrived the visitors we had actually expected. Dick and Suzie from Charlottesville, who were in the area for a family event, had expected to see only us and found us in a crowd. We had not seen them in over a year and so it was great that they had managed to sneak away for a bit from their family obligations. We tried but failed to keep them for dinner. We managed to snare Andrew and Katie Blair for dinner and with Jim and even Sita, who claims not to like lobsters, we consumed 6 of the eight lobsters. Thus we made a little dent in the abundance of food that rained down on us this last week. However, we still have the duck, the lasagna and a bunch of frozen meals, so we are all set for the next few days. Thank you all for your continued support, rides, efforts, food and company. It has brought us to where we are and it keeps pulling us along on the slow but steady path to our full recovery.

A good night sleep, the right heating and then icing must have contributed to a good start, or maybe the heavy exercise regimen is starting to pay off. Between the two of us we did hours of exercises yesterday. I felt more limber this morning than I have in months. But I am cautious because I have learned that limber now does not mean limber tomorrow, and cause and effect is never that obvious in our recovery.

Sita came back exhausted but enthusiastic from Shanghai, bringing more stuff into the house as well as some spectacular green tea and green tea cookies. But mostly we did not see her as she spent the day recuperating from an exhausting flight and a missed day.

We enjoyed the day sitting outside as much as we could, it was another 10 plus day until the fog rolled in. Tim Browne came by for IT help to Axel which mostly meant moving shelves and things around in his office and sorting out the cable mess. Now Axel is ready to take on the computer-based financial and paper administration of our household again. Tim told us some good stories about his project to bring digitized children’s’ books to parts of the world where libraries don’t work or are unavailable. The most fascinating piece was his discovery of hundreds of exquisite Japanese children books in some US university’s book depository. The books were part of a load of thousands of books that were confiscated by the head of the US occupation administration in charge of censorship after the Second World War.

Woody Kelly came by to report on his trip to England and the launching of a book that features his mom as one of the Airport Transportation Auxiliaries (ATA) during World War Two, “Spitfire Girls” His mom, Ann, one of my heroes, who passed away a little over a year ago, cheered me on as I was learning to fly. A photo of her and two other ATAs at an airfield in Montreal, taken during the war always accompanied me on my flights and was retrieved, without a scratch, from the wreckage. She will continue to fly with me.

Since Sita and Jim were on a completely different time schedule, especially with regard to waking and sleeping, we dined just the two of us on leftovers from several delicious meals and then watched Babette’s feast, a story about redemption and the reconciliation of religious and earthly bliss. I had seen it many years before and watched it through different eyes now. It is also a story about community and grace, two things we have learned a thing or two about. We put ourselves to bed once more without the supervision of our children. That too is beginning to feel normal.