I made it home tonight, and I am now one blog post away from the sleep of the dead. I just had a couple observations and one agonizing scream of despair, and then I'm gonna peace out. The cats had turned on the television between the last time the mah jongg master fed them and when she dropped me off tonight, so they're all extra freaked out and ready to cuddle and sleep too. The good news is I appear to have come out on the other side of the 24 hour bug I picked up from my host family, that left me struggling with the dual problems of fever all of last night, freezing and roasting (and both made it impossible to sleep before my flight).
One of the things I have noticed as my diet and health dramatically improve, is that my sense of smell has returned. For years, I could barely even smell live Christmas trees in my own home or all the beautiful flowers I plant every year, and it made me sad that I couldn't pick those good things out anymore. Last year, I abandoned an evergreen wreath in the garage, and it just stayed there until I started cleaning out the garage a few weeks ago. I noticed somewhere in the last few months, that I had started to smell it, this dead pine wreath, as I walked past it. I like that I can smell plants again, but there is a much less pleasant side to this. I have spent the last five days in very close proximity with thousands of humans. I was in airplanes, buses, stadium crowds, and milling about in heavily populated cities. I have learned something I forgot over the last fifteen or twenty years. Humans stink. They stink more than I had ever remembered from my youth. What do Americans eat? People, stop it! Stop eating so much garbage that when you crop-dust in an open-air stadium, people two or three rows away become nauseated. Stop making airplanes into torture devices because of the poison your gut and skin bacteria are emitting. And I promise I am not fat-shaming when I say, bodies look awful. Even people of healthy weight are shaped in ways that make them appear to be unhealthy under their clothes. We need to think about what we are doing to ourselves. And then we need to make some changes. I will stand at the front of the line, and make all those changes myself too. I will walk the walk.
Not everything on the trip home was bad. My daughter and I had plenty of time to enjoy breakfast and coffee together, before we flew off to opposite coasts. The airport in Denver was emptier than I have ever seen it, even in the middle of the night. I can't explain why. There literally was no line at security. We wound through the ropes and walked right up to a TSA agent to get checked out. The trains to the concourses were mostly empty. It was really strange and I welcomed it. The Atlanta airport was good for a real dinner, as it usually is. I skipped the food court and went for a nice sit-down place. I don't ever want to eat off of a disposable plate again, if I can avoid it. The last leg of my trip was a night flight, and it was wonderfully peaceful. As we descended, the view out the window changed from twinkling orange lights to huge glowing pools of orange and pale green, as patchy fog rolled in from the coast. It was so eerily beautiful, and it threw me at first. I thought we had circled out over the ocean in a holding pattern, until I recognized what I was seeing.
Now, for the part that is crushing my soul. I tried to take a photo of downtown Denver this morning, when I arrived to meet my daughter for breakfast, and something on the screen of the phone flashed a message about the SD card, but I didn't see it before it vanished. I let it slip from my mind as I looked for my daughter and her friend to pick me up from the bus/train station. When I landed in Atlanta, and turned my phone back on, it told me that the SD card was damaged, and was now safe to remove. So far the only thing I can tell is missing is the folder of 3000+ photos that I had been keeping on there, and I haven't backed up since June. At least a thousand of the pictures gone weren't saved anywhere but on that chip. I'm going to go to bed and hope that they exist somewhere, and maybe well-rested, I can find them tomorrow. Think happy thoughts for me. I'm worried that I've used up all my good luck for the weekend.
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