January 5, 2008

Dark of the morning, typical of my home-from-Europe early rising. I must say of until-now-unknown Larkin, that he was a faithful caretaker, and all looks just as it did, or better, and the cats are not freaky. I did sort of hope he’d stay here for a while with me, so I could have his company, but his choice was probably the comfortable one. It was good to have the cats around me last night again. I purposefully tried not to think of them in Dublin, for it made me sad. After the eucatastrophe of first class on the plane, I guess you’d say the rest of the journey was uneventful, or at least not unexpected. The six-hour layover in Atlanta was always on the schedule but turned out to be more grueling than it looked on paper. I was depressed, and almost frantic with exhaustion, by the time I landed in Asheville. I did phone dad from Atlanta. He said, “I wish I could be there with you,” but I didn’t know whether he meant Ireland or the airport or some more general thing. Snow lies on the ground here, as it was falling from the air when I left Dublin. Red and cobalt dawn in the east.

Mickey says she and I won “Outstanding Performance” certificates over at HART, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This makes me very happy. I have felt myself wandering in the dark locally, and that is a light.

The Christmas trees in the Asheville Airport reminded me that I arrived back with two days of Christmas left.