Day Two

Day one was nothing much; everything passed in a blurry haze of travel fatigue: unpacking, eating, visiting, moving into our Alaska mode and learning to sleep again in the bright light of 9pm.

Day two was busy. The children, unwilling to acknowledge the fact that they owe their sleep banks a great deal of time, were up before 6am. Argh. We walked to Mia's and I went to work at about 9am. I worked until 5pm, picked up my kids, went home where a neighbor had, oh so kindly, made us dinner. (I love my dad's neighbors!) I got my children ready for bed and at 8pm, with Lulu in bed - but not asleep - and the boys watching Chaotic, I went back to work. I worked until about 11:30pm and finally walked home in semi-darkness. Did you think I was up here to have a good time?

I know this is scintillating reading but I have this compulsion to blog, to write my life and to force allow others the opportunity to read it.

I did, this morning, finish reading The Time-Traveler's Wife. The book was beautifully written; I love this author's style. I loved the story too, but I had a quite surreal moment lying in my bed, in the room in which my mother died, reading of Henry's passing. I cried. In a book about time travel, with Henry popping in and out of others' lives, with my own feelings of temporal ambiguity, it was an odd feeling to mourn Henry and my mother; to remember the moment my mother lie in this exact same place, rattling her last few breaths. So this morning, I am melancholy. (I'm sure that lack of sleep has nothing to do with that!) I am trying to stay anchored to this place, to be a mother and not just miss one, to juggle work and kids and summer break and cousins and vacation to Alaska.

I think I'm doing okay.