Celebrating Survival

Right now Ax and I are in our living room in our home, the home we evacuated from about two weeks ago. Ax is lounging on our massive beanbag lounges while watching cartoons and eating a chocolate chip cookie our friends baked for us, a plate of which we found at our door when we got home last night. I’m sitting nearby on the mushy, woefully discolored white club chair/Cleo scratching post and wondering about getting up to get earplugs so the sounds of cartoon superhero anthropomorphic airplanes can fade a bit more to the background while I dredge up something super-personal yet semi-universal to write about.

I’m gonna close my eyes and take a deep breath. It’s been a long couple of weeks. Yesterday’s long journey home was epic, and not in a good way, with blizzards and extreme air turbulence and running for connections and negotiating seats to be together and four- or five-hour delays while sitting on the runway in a place no reasonably intelligent person would have ever decided to put a cross-country hub. With my mother and Ax, who were both down a meal, as was I, and nothing to eat except pretzels, which Ax wouldn’t eat, and an organic cinnamon cereal, the entire box of which Ax ultimately decided to make dinner.

But we made it, by Godfrey!  We are home. When we walked through the door at about 2am California time, 5am New York time, Ax asked if he could have show and pasta, and I said yes. I made him his tortellini marinara, which we miraculously had stocked, and fired up the sodamaker for a tall sippy cup of fizzy water. He and I snuggled on the beanbags watching his show while the pasta water boiled. It felt good to be in our living room, with our beanbags, and our blanket, and our TV.

Later this morning we will join his classmates and other friends to give gifts and sing songs to the firefighters at our local fire station. I’m glad we are back for that, which seems like the first of what hopefully will be many events to heal and recover and join together to celebrate survival before we get back to business as usual in the New Year. I’m gonna keep going.