What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Home. Here it is. Here we are. It seems like it’s been far longer than a month.

Sarah has moved out, back to UNCA. The spiders have moved in, no doubt to eat the many thousands of little moths that hatched from the sunflower seed in our absence. Andy and Stacy have been selling DVDs and eating out. Jenny the dog has been riding around with BBL in her new golf cart. Life goes on…

It hasn’t rained here in a month of Sundays, we hear, and the land looks dusty and tired. The Southeast drought has intensified to “extreme” levels now. It has been very hot this past month. Some humungo new mall has been approved for our local village while we were away. A new report talks excitedly of 19,000 new homes to be built in our county in the next 13 years. The madness is everywhere. The madness is here.

We caught the Light Rail to Penn Station and the Amtrak to home. Pretty much on time. A fairly good ride. There were some sane and human employees on this train. That always helps. They helped keep the indignities to a minimum.

We rolled into Cary around 6, where Andy and Stacy picked us up. We had dinner at our favorite Mexican place, then came home and crashed. In our own bed.

We got up today and made coffee and talked and cried and started to do laundry. The house is a mess. My cold, the cold I’d been putting off by sheer power of will the past week, blossomed in my head today, leaving me irritated and tired. We talked with Barbara, retrieved our retriever, caught up some more with Andy and Stacy, did a few dishes. Home stuff. Grounding stuff. It feels good.

We’ve got a month now. To process the last tour and prepare for the next one. It all feels a bit surreal. We met so many good and wonderful people. We fell into their lives for a day or three, then left. Connecting and disconnecting, forging bonds and moving on, we’d stop and fall in love, as Sally would say, and then have to move on. It hurt, and it felt good. It was trying and exhausting, and it felt important and real and helpful. We were doing what we came here to do. Here to this planet. To this life. What more could we ask?

The Northeast Tour of 2007 is finished. It would not have happened without the hard work and dedicated effort of the following people: Jo Sippie-Gora, Philip Botwinick, Tom Nielsen, Fred Cervin, Maria Tupper, Jim Weed, Torie Weed, Annabelle Westling Williams, Carol Tashie, RC Williams, Rachel Zegerius, Tim Wessels, Marcia Gauvin, Margo Baldwin, Dennis Rydevsky, Essie Howe, Patrick Burke, Sarah Shepherd, Rob Williams, Sally Sherman (& Dagney!), Paula Hay, Mary Dillon, Kevin Stonesoup, Andy Tolins, Jason Godesky, Giulianna Lamanna, Rob Content, Gorden Glover and the many people at the various venues, the libraries and universities and UU churches and hotels that provided the spaces for us to meet and watch and dialogue and share. We thank you.

Love to us all,

Tim and Sally

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Travel Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.