epilogue

My friend KLW has been after me to write some sort of concluding entry to sort of tie everything off. I haven't felt much like doing so. Well, I intended to do it, I just never seemed to be in the mood. Coming home has been weird. My time and energy has been taken up with all the mundane tasks of sliding back into a life that was put on hold and at the same time continued on without me. I still have 37 boxes sitting at my parents' house that I haven't unpacked - instead there were boxes of my grandma's things to look through and cry over. There was a new baby to visit and a new pregnancy to toast. Photos to print and sort through (the finished scrap book will take a while to get around to - There was so much more that didn't make it into my blog) and telling the story of the trip over and over. Dentist appointments to make, paperwork and administrative things to do (still haven't filed my tax return).

I've been back at work seven weeks. Some things have changed and some things that I wish had changed, haven't. But that's the nature of life. I'm glad to be back. I'm still running into people who I haven't seen since I got home. I've worked out a verbal shorthand to answer the question 'so how was it'. There's too much to say and so much I can't even put into words. And of course it's not like I have some profound and life-altering experience or news to share (no new husband, not pregnant, not leaving Canada to move permanently to New Zealand, not changing careers, didn't become a vegetarian or learn a foreign language), but the reality is that my goal was to skip winter and I accomplished that. The other stuff - the people, the experiences, the sights - that's primarily quiet, non-flashy and meaningful mostly to me.

So that's it - thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of me during this time and especially now as I struggle to adjust to life again. I'm glad that people seemed to have enjoyed my blog and that I made a few people laugh. Hopefully I did enough so that those of you who were living vicarously feel you got your money's worth.