Getting Back Into It--Thanks and Pictures

Hello again everyone!

We're well post "termination dust" here now--the snow is halfway down the mountains.

Today is two months since I got out of 'treatment', which means it is six weeks since the MFA program residency, which means it is over a month since I got home and since Phil's surgery, which means it is a week since my mom left, and a week of appointments and a short-notice editing deadline, which means my first packet is due...tomorrow. 

On and on and on and on and on and round. I finally saw the psychiatrist last week, who knows me far less well than my ND and therapist. She wants more stringent 'monitoring', which is exactly what I was glad to be free from, so things feel to be swinging in a way to remind me of treatment as well as the far more welcome reconnection offered by my packet deadline.

Speaking of reconnecting, I have missed this blog, I have missed you guys; I promise I'll be back soon with some of the several posts currently in my head, and perhaps to ask your thoughts on directions I might take this blog moving forward. Thank you so much for the wonderful comments on my mum's post, and thank you to all my friends with whom I've been woefully out of contact recently, and Tracy E, I so look forward to getting to know you more and maybe making friendship bracelets... 

And thank you to my neglected worry beads, and thank you to all the friends who gave me nail-care products recently as I continue to pull at those poor digits, and thank you to the floor for holding your dust until I can vacuum, and thank you to my long-suffering toenails, my under-brushed hair...

All my friends, all parts of myself--please accept my thanks and apologies. I'll aim to email or call you come the weekend, come the passing of this deadline and, with any luck, the beginning of a less frenetic period.

And since I'm so far out of the rhythm and so burnt by the ticking clock that anything I could post would be a squeezed non-sequitur, I'm going to do the only sensible thing and share some pictures. More words soon.

A few final pictures of my mum from our drive to Anchorage to take her to the airport--one of the most beautiful times of year for that drive, autumn glory at its ephemeral best up here.

This birch tree so close to Tern Lake its feet are wet!

Yet another in the timeworn genre of "Ela in a tree" pics...

Mum and Phil.

The Kenai was in impressive (read: evacuation from homes) flood. Check out that glorious glacial blue.

Here's another view of the snow on the mountains that day Phil and I finally headed back home: a day of gray lowering clouds suddenly replaced by blue sky and then rain again. The way winter skies are, but we'll be glad of Fall for a while. Definitely getting darker here, but at least the astonishing windstorms have died down.

We went blueberry picking one more time. It's freezing pretty hard at nights now, so the trick was to pick the blueberries while they were still frozen: try to pick thawed frozen berries and you get mush, especially when the blueberries are tucked away like this--that's some tricky picking!

On a final fruity note, we got a parcel in the mail from Phil's mom. It smelled of apples, and when we opened it, we found it was apples: apples from the little orchard Phil and I planted three years ago, no less! How lovely to be getting fruit from those trees already! The big ones are Honeycrisps; the little ones I think are Snow, Jonathan and Rome. I know everyone's all excited about Honeycrisps, but I'd never really had one before because (a) they're usually frightfully expensive and (b) I generally don't prefer big apples (and perhaps (c) I can be put off by hype!). All that said, my goodness, those Honeycrisps may be the best apples I've ever tasted.

But lookit: these three are all apples! There's the huge Honeycrisp, the smallish Snow, and a little Alaska Crabapple! I don't know that we see humans sized differently by such orders of magnitude--talking fully grown humans here--but perhaps our souls or auras can differ by that much.

I missed Rosh Hashanah, but with these apples, a sweet new year to everyone.