Did this two years ago from this very stool. At the local corner cafe, offering a quick hello before returning to my hopefully still-sleeping child. This trip has been alternately magical and frustrating, the latter such events presenting me with opportunities to ‘walk the talk’… that is to say, to stop and take a breath, step back, accept the unplanned and await the happy, unexpected surprises that appear as a result. Just now I greeted my old next door neighbor – it’s tiny surprises like that that keep one’s spirit bright (in spite of having lost one’s favorite sweater somewhere on the road).
Life can sometimes seem like a great big game of ‘good news, bad news’, and so it’s been with this trip. I can’t relate much here and now, but suffice to say that Elihu had a dangerously allergic reaction on the train somewhere between Utica and Syracuse (and I learned that yes, one can have a train stop and arrange to be met by an ambulance) then thanks to Benadryl, a worse reaction was prevented. The panic and fear that we experienced would have been nothing to what we would have experienced if a sink hole opened up underneath the tracks and derailed the train. The way it did just 24 hours later on the very same line. Good thing for us. (Just so you know – although it was a great mess, thankfully no one died.) Bad thing for me – I might have to take a bus back to Schenectady. Ah well.
Gotta get back to the kid. Besides, I’m finding all this noise and activity around me a bit unsettling. After all I’m not a city girl anymore.
The Hillhouse 