When Life is Faster Than the Pen

I meant to write about the next phase of my journey, about crossing Utah, and sitting in Rock Springs Wyoming with my brother on the phone, trying to find a place to camp. About leaving the highway and diving into the fragrant, dusky desert, and the high point of my whole journey, a night spent listening to coyotes singing among the canyons of a land carved by water and left dry as bone.  I meant to tell you about Nebraska's unexpected beauty, about the moment plains turned to prairie, about Medicine Bow and grassland, about the red-gold tint of autumn fields of grain and the North Platte River.  I meant to tell you about the little nature preserve where I sat and read under a tree while the sun cooked my lunch, about crossing the Missouri and the Mississippi, and watching the smudge over Chicago grow larger on the horizon. 

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I was going to write about being in that city where I spent my teens, seeing it again after so many years, and about the two days I spent with my oldest friends in the U.S.  About meeting the grieving partner of my dead poet friend and finding my way to a synagogue in Cleveland without knowing it was where friends from California were rabbi & educator. I really wanted to tell you of the absurdity of the KOA ("we spell Kamping with a K") Kampground in Sandusky, Ohio and the beautiful lake in upstate New York, where my neighbors set up their outdoor living room, complete with generator, sports channel and, I kid you not, an artificial palm tree and a two foot parrot with a spinning tail and a sign saying "every hour is happy hour."

But sometimes life is faster than the pen, or the keyboard.  I arrived to medical crises and way more that needing doing than I had the ability to do.  Hospital visits and medical decisions, clearing my mother's room and starting to unpack with my wonderful attendant's help, trying to set up support systems and find my way around with a GPS that always tells me to turn down the street I just passed.  Ten days of that and then I was on a plane to Puerto Rico for the first time in six years. So much has happened so quickly that the story of that amazing cross-country journey has fallen behind.  Soon I'll upload my photographs, but new stories are blooming faster than I can tell them.  So this is just to say that when things stop spinning quite so fast, I'll have a lot to say.