Personally, I felt the shift begin when Covid first hit in March. Poets and writers alike have come alive with words of inspiration and a return to home.

August 9th~2021

    I have a bounty of inner worlds that I’ve scribed into journals. Volumes of thoughts and feelings, dreams and scenes from days well thought and dreamy that I keep in boxes that now are dusty by the years of storage. It is my last year here in this home in the delta, and I want to write another one, one page every day.

8/10/2021

   The pandemic hit us in 2020, many of us are hanging on, trying our best to make things as normal as possible. I see my family, still don’t visit friends or travel, and though I wear a mask and am fully vaccinated I hesitate again to go out into the world because of the Covid variant.

   My cupboards and closets are slowly being downsized or packed for the anticipated move to Conway to live closer to my children, and those little adorable grandchildren that I long to be a part of their everyday life.

    I feel certain consternation though in the midst of this activity as if I am slowly letting go of the home I’ve known for 40 years. Memories are sneaky things; they appear in objects as you pack or discard. My mother is over my shoulder as I wrap the same pieces she once held to give to me. Did she feel this too, this sense of fading dream life, and excitement for a new one, a better one that isn’t so isolated?

   Rosa is helping me with all this, and my children are coming on labor day to gather and claim their things and pieces they want to claim. I feel my life becoming staged like I am in set design mode for the move. I look at wallpaper and pull up the listing on Zillow of Rhi’s old house where we will move to, adjusted in my mind where my furniture will go best. I pick out wallpaper and paint to make it our own, which right now is somewhere between a Ballard magazine and an eastern meditation space of repose and enlightening whimsy.

    I make lists and schedules to ease the transitions’, knowing full well that it will all be changed in the flow of it. Such is life. In the quake and sands shifting moment by moment I know in my heart that God is leading me home.