Am I REALLY here????

The thing about being gone for so long and immersed in a completely different way of life is that when you do come home, the comparisons begin.

I know that it is not "normal" for someone to go away, leave their family and just do something completely for themselves for a month.  I find that sad, actually, but it is the way it is.  I also think that it is sad that the majority of my family (with the exception of Charlie and Hallie, so I guess not the majority, just half!) had no interest whatsoever in joining me on my venture.  Whatever the excuse -- time, money, desire -- the bottom line is that they didn't want to go.  And I did.

A lot.

I just didn't expect that it would be THIS hard to be back.  It doesn't help that it is butt-ugly out all the time, with the exception of a day or two in the two weeks I've been back where there was actually some blue and sun in the sky.  I miss the utter beauty that was Sedona -- the majestic towering red rocks amidst a near-constant blue sky.  I miss the energy that seemed to flow and swirl and crack around me, providing an alive feeling that pushed me to the highest peak with ease.

The pictures say it all if you ask me!  The top was taken today, the view out of my office window.

I loved the vibrant colors of the food at my favorite market -- fresh food, alive food.

Here, it's a waiting game.  For it will get pretty here, and then the bugs will come out and force us all back into the caves of our New Hampshire lifestyles.  We will have fresh food too!  For at least three months, it will grow and make me believe for a short time that I CAN live here.  But then it will shrivel up and die and it will grow cold and then I will be forced to stare at dull, dead food and yearn for more.

It's not fair that I was in Sedona when it was unseasonally warm, it's not fair to compare since its not apples to apples.  (But them apples were fresh!)  In my heart I know that this is a beautiful place, that soon the grayness will be replaced with green and the promise of renewed life that is Spring. (And then we will get those few weeks of summer we are allotted, oh joy.)  And then it will be Fall and the return to the many months of gray winter.

There was a woman who lived in California most of her life, and then she moved to N.H. with her husband and family.  She was miserable, and I never quite understood it.  I am native New Hampshire, and there is a Yankee mentality that I can embrace that almost enjoys all the crap -- the mud, the black flies, the absence of a decent summer, the never-ending winters -- because we are tough and we can take it.

She was so miserable, I would say to her and her husband, why don't you move?  Why stay somewhere where you are absolutely so unhappy?  But stay they did, year after year after year.  Until she died.  They called it a "sudden" death -- a cancer out of nowhere that took her in weeks.  Except that she had been dying for the 20 years I'd known her, bit by bit, the life force drained from her until she couldn't sustain herself in this climate any longer.

She never traveled either.  I wonder if it was too hard to come home?

"Your whole point of view of your whole reality is based on what you believe you are, but what you believe about yourself is just a concept.  It is knowledge, but knowledge does not mean it is the truth.  Knowledge only means it is what you know."

Welcome to my world, as they say.