Home

Three weeks of being away and roughly 14 hours of travel.  I made it back feeling great.

I suspect this feeling was a little off target as I appear to have had at least one phone conversation and did half of a New York Times crossword with almost no memory of either.

But the next morning I was up early (or slept in if you follow my previous time zone), stretched and went out on the porch with my morning coffee.

Things looked great.  The lawn had been mowed, the flowers were blooming.  The air smelt like spring, and after the sheep meadows and excavation dirt of the prior two weeks it also had an intangible familiar scent to it.  It smelt like home.

The only discordant note was a very pesky robin sitting on a nearby bush lambasting me in chirpy bird talk.  What? Hey, I kept the feeder full all winter, the back yard pond is open for bathing, what more do you expect of me?

Ah.

I've always suspected that if I stayed away too long shiftless squatters would move in, and it seems I had the right of it.