We're on the march

We're walking. From our house, here's where we walked this weekend:

1. an outdoor jazz festival
2. a new little coffee place with decent espresso and nice gelato for the kids
3. an organic produce store for fruit
4. a small, independent grocer for juice, soymilk, a few other essentials
5. a microbrewery for a box of beer
6. a playground
7. our kids school to check it out
8. a beautiful cemetery, just to have a look. What a wonderful setting to talk to our kids about life and death. We have wonderful kids.
9. an independent bookseller
10. a fair trade craft shop
11. a bank
12. a coffee shop (4 times. coffeemaker still on truck)

A friend of mine asked me whether the last year was beginning to feel like a huge hallucination. It is. It will be important to take the time to think all of this through, do the work that I need to do to seal in the lessons of my sabbatical. I think that once we've established a proper beachhead, gotten our kids into some routines, begun the enormous job of restarting careers (one of my first unwelcomes from the office was the news that my research rating had been dropped a bit. Not disastrous or unexpected news, given that my sabbatical has not and will not produce any pointless research papers, but a little pinprick of annoyance nevertheless. Over the next 3 years, this will cost me a few thousand dollars in salary. If I had stayed home, slaved in my lab, pumped out papers that nobody will ever read, I would be more highly valued here), it will be slightly easier to focus on the sea and sand that we left behind, how it is connected to what we have here, and how we can cling tightly to the slender thread that binds us to it and to each other. I know we can do it.