Coming Soon: Home Sweet Home?

Last week I got email from Jen with an incredibly warm and supportive reminder that I have been writing this blog for twelve whole months. It was July 14, Bastille Day, last summer that I began telling the story of this year and now--almost without me even realizing it--this experience of going away is almost over and soon it will be time to come home.

What does that mean, where is my next home? I am not sure. I spent three days last weekend looking at what felt like dozens of apartments everywhere from North Berkeley to Alameda and yet my goal to return to the mountains Sunday afternoon with a brand-new set of keys in my hand went unmet. My stuff still lives in a storage space on Webster Street and by the time I get to sleep in my own bed once again fifteen months will have passed since I last pulled up the covers and closed my eyes for one last night of sleep on Judah Street, two springs ago now.

I am trying not to be impatient, I am trying not to stress out about wanting to know where I will next cook my own dinner and scrub my own bathtub but it is hard at times. For now I relish the familiarity of drifting off to dream at night in my little camp house among the tall trees but at the same time I know soon the time will come for me to pack up and move once again, to leave this place for one last as-of-yet-unknown destination. Do I want to be settled? Yes. Will the time come, perhaps sooner than I could even imagine, that I will once again yearn for the nomadic life I've lived this past year? Yes. I am sure of it.

Back In Chicago

During my time in Chicago I rode the train downtown to meet up with my cousin Kristine. We hadn't seen each other in a ridiculously long time so it was great to eat piles of sushi and drink a few bottles of Ichiban beer and swap stories of our lives. On my way back to Union Station I walked by the Sears Tower. Whoa--tall.

Blog Silence

I just got back to camp tonight after being gone for a week. Last Sunday night I left at 8 p.m. and got to San Francisco at 1 a.m. The next morning at 10 I was on a plane to Chicago. My grandmother Florence, now of blessed memory, had passed away on Saturday morning and I went back to be with my family for everything from ordering sandwich trays at Jewel to weeping at the sound of my brother's bagpipes during her funeral Mass.

I have to say, she was quite an amazing lady. The last time I saw Grandma was in January, the most recent time I went to Chicago, when they first told us she was dying. Half a year later I returned to honor her life and her memory. I have many more stories to tell about her but right now I've been up since the local equivalent of 4 a.m. and after two flights and a 4.5 hour car ride back to Yosemite I am ready to get some sleep. So, more later.

But first I want to publicly thank my grandmother for having been part of our family, for having been a Kotleba and for helping to make me one too. May her memory be a blessing and may my father, who is her son, and his siblings be comforted with the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

What I've Done So Far On My Day Off

Wednesday night my first official day off of the summer began--the break between sessions two weeks ago when I rode my bike to Hetch Hetchy didn't really count since there were no campers so everyone had time off and we all just laid around--but this time is a real, honest-to-goodness, "ha ha you are working but I am not because it is my day off" day off.

That night at the staff meeting during the "rides" section I raised my hand and said "I'm sure no one is going to the bay this close to session break but I am actually on my day off starting about half an hour ago and would love to go to the city tomorrow if anyone is going...?" And I was so sure no one would be until at the end of the meeting when Michael, one of the drivers, came up and told me that he was leaving at 9 the next morning, Thursday morning, to drive to Berkeley and pick up the new kiln that Arts and Crafts had ordered and did I want to come with him?

Um, YES PLEASE.

So I did laundry and packed my backpack and straightened my office and cleaned my house (all of which I thought I'd probably do on Thursday and Friday during my day off while I was still in camp, before anyone would have a chance to leave and take me back) and slept for a few hours and got up and threw my stuff into the huge camp vehicle and began the even-longer-than-usual trip back to Berkeley...the statewide speed limit is 55 miles an hour when towing a trailer, you see.

I got to the city yesterday afternoon around 4:30 and in a perfectly orchestrated ballet of time got Nalini's extra set of keys from Sara and let myself into the apartment I have been so generously lent for the weekend and promptly fell asleep on the couch. Dinner was a huge magnificent pile of sushi from Deep and I spent the evening catching up with friends and then took an Actual Bath--the first tubful of water was horrifyingly beige from my accumulated dirt so I got up, scrubbed out the tub, and took bath #2--before sleeping in a real, true, non-futon, non-fold out sofa, genuine bed for the first time since New Hampshire in October.

Since waking up at 8 I have been sitting in one place, right here, remembering that I love the fog of the city because it buffers time in a way that my overactive mind and overambitious to-do list find very calming. The light has not shifted, the view outside the window has not changed during the two hours I've been, very deservedly I might add, sitting here and reading and writing and watching a movie. Soon I will get up and get dressed, go hunt down some breakfast and start in on my task of running errands and collecting things I need to bring back to camp: flannel shirts and recycled jeans at Crossroads/Goodwill, wrap-around skirts from India via Haight Street, some random silver ring to fill up the weirdly empty space left on my finger when I lost my ring in the laundry room a week or so ago, cold medicine from Walgreens, coconut oil and the darkest of chocolate from Trader Joe's. Until then I will proudly say that I have spent what feels like the first two real hours of my day off doing just what the picture shows, and I couldn't be happier about it.