End Game

I still owe you pictures, and I'll post them soon.

Meanwhile, we're back in Melbourne now, having ticked the last item off of our bucket list, with only a small amount of time left in the sabbatical.

What is left to do?

Plan a graduate workshop for August.  Rewrite the last section of paper four.  Send in two abstracts.  Write up a final report for a grant.  Prove one missing result for one project, one missing result for another project.  Contact various colleagues with professional requests.   Reread papers two and three, and update constants in paper three.  Start work on two new projects, suggested by colleagues.

You would think seven months of isolation would be enough time to clear the plate, but it is not.  The plate cannot be cleared. 

Now that we are nearing the end, simple daily tasks require more thought.  Shopping needs to be handled more carefully.  Do we really need a new jar of jam?  No more bulk rice -- we'll just have to eat potatoes instead.  And after taking an inventory the pantry and the freezer, we have realized we need to eat corn with every meal.

And even though there are still weeks plural to go, every day points a little more toward the end.  This evening, walking up the path to our doorstep, where I've watched the birds and the possums, and the trees change from green to yellow to winter gray, I felt a pang of sadness.  Soon, this will no longer be my walk, and with new ownership, new plans for the place we've been renting, it will never be mine again ever. 

A couple of years after we left England, we were back in the town where we had lived.  We walked back up the hill we had walked daily when Jonathan was in preschool.  The apartment complex behind our building had been torn down and rebuilt.  We almost couldn't find our house because it had been added to.  Changed.  The life we lived there doesn't exist anymore, just as the life we live here now will no longer exist in a matter of weeks.

Sigh.

But somewhere else, hot summer sunshine awaits.  We're a little bit sad for what we are leaving, but a little bit glad for where we are going.  And we're not gone yet.

More posts to come.