Almost levitating with excitement

Margie is all a-flutter with delight and expectation. Her daughter lives in the same building where Margie lives, and her son who is a physician in New York will arrive next week with his partner. She hasn't seen that son since before Covid. Possibly the son from Washington, a medical researcher, will come down as well, and they can have a family reunion and an early 95th birthday celebration for her. Her eyes, filled with excitement, gleam like those of a toddler. “I have such wonderful children,” she tells me. 

She was much less tired this week, though we did stop and rest here, leaning against Powell’s City of Books as we made our way to Peet’s coffee shop. 

Margie told me all the many plans—driving to the coast, eating out here and there. It sounds exhausting but joy-filled, and their calendar is packed. She isn’t sure, but I may be invited to breakfast with them one day. We’ll see.

The latest news from South Africa is troubling. The Mooi River Toll Plaza is a place my family knows well. In all our trips from Pietermaritzburg to Lesotho and back, we stopped there for tea and scones and a stretch. Marvelous scones with chunks of crystalized ginger, strong black tea from a massive steel urn, enough caffeine to keep me wide awake for the remaining hours of the trip. If the toll plaza remains blocked because of burned-out trucks, no food can get to Lesotho. Still no word from my daughter since her panic-stricken rhetorical questions on Monday.