Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Still struggling to return to the daily blog. It'll be a while, I think: no time at work, and no net access in the borrowed skinny-traincar condo I return to each afternoon to find my wife and children just about to go stir crazy. I save my email for the weekend, wonder who's still out there following our long gypsy walkabout.

In the meantime, the brain still percolates oblogatory. Each early morning as I drive the L of first on highway, then another, through the sunrise and fog, the words and phrases that once became the daily blogentry jostle in my head.

Backed-up entries now too stale to write properly will forever exist as small fragments penned on paper scraps against the steering wheel. At night before my increasingly early bedtime, I empty my pockets of the prompts of a universe not yet settled, the cues of an actor who never takes the stage.

Recent lost blogsubjects, each sure to be beautiful in their own way if given proper time and attention but now lost to the ages, include:

The curious and somehow sinister coincidence of Willow's new tendency to cringe from me when she is tired or fighting "because I don't want you to hit me" (I have never hit her and hope always to contain the beast inside me that constantly threatens to override my conviction as parent and human), and my immediate reaction to the huge bruise she sports from falling out of the bathtub. To wit: as a teacher, I KNOW this is how kids get taken away from their parents, seeing bruises and hearing however-unfounded concerns or abuse, and can a parent do anything about it?
Some sort of 9/11 reflection in the context of Katrina, starting with the reminder that there is no hierarchy of disaster.

How much we enjoy living in the smalltown downtown bustle of Northampton, just around the corner from everything, and the irony of doing so en route to a new home in the middle of absolutely beautiful rural nowhere.

How damn good I am at both fulfilling and interweaving all the sundry parts of this seen-as-impossible new job, especially in setting one problem against another to solve them both with little fuss but much amazement; how nice it is to be recognized daily for the work, and how wonderful it is to be exhausted from it all.

We'll settle soon. Yesterday's inspection of the new house turned up little but a few easily sprayed-for carpenter bees and a few loose wires in the basemenet. The homeowners have signed the official paperwork; the loan has come through. We'll close by the end of the month, move in over the weekend, find furniture through October. And then, oh, then, almost ten months after we began to plan our gypsy life, we'll be settled again.

And when that final piece of the puzzle falls in place, and the celebrations are over, I'll be dammed if I don't start blogging daily again. For the daily blog is after all both my meditation and my muse, both symptom and completion of the recentered life we long for.

In the meanwhile, these lost blogs reflect our lives, I suppose: busy but still unsettled, hovering in the eaves of the mind, waiting for the universe to come together like a thousand bees displaced.

Comments:

Isn't busy yet still unsettled kinda something like the title of your blog? "Not all Who Wander Are Lost?" Yer wanderin', but ya ain't lost.

Me? I'm envious 'cuz you can practically live off of wonderful Pinocchio's pizza. If gas were cheap, I'd run down and get a buncha slices.

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