Seems like I've been away for ages although I've tried to keep in touch with some of the people I enjoy reading on OS while on vacation in the States.   Still, I've only managed a few.   My intention is to catch up but is that ever really possible?  Maybe it would be if everyone stopped writing for a day but there are a lot of prolific people on this site.

There was something liberating about being away from all access to the computer for a week at the beach.  A  complete break with routine refreshes the brain like nothing else, not to mention sea air and a school of dolphins swimming past in the morning. 

I'm back in England now with the usual assortment of emotions.  Will this, my home of the last twenty years, ever feel like "home?"  The weather, grey and in the fifties, makes the Charleston steam a heady memory.  We build a fire in the stove to offset the shock while this, our "labor day" weekend in the UK, promises to be a wet one.  My "Carolina walk"  gets left in the dust.  It's back to hunched shoulders, head ducked, hurry up.  Diagnosis:  it's the post-vacation blahs.  

The sun, the sea breeze, those busy little sea birds who don't like to get their feet wet.  The she-crab soup, the iced tea, the smoked pork butt and did my sons ever order a meal without wings?  Visiting with my mother over a sweating glass of Hendrick's Gin and cucumber, sitting around the table with all the family, laughing, eating, and telling the old stories.  The dry, clean smell of the long-needled pine trees that occupy the sand hills around my parents' house and the shrill cicadas that are the chorus of late summer.  Time to put them all away.  For now.

Allow me these paragraphs, please, to just wallow a little, before somebody gives me a verbal slap.  It won't take me long to buck up, get over my jet-lag, and remember how very lucky I am.  One more...sigh...that oughta do it!