I’m aswirl with fullness and memories and emotions and gratitude today.  Being back home has been a healing time of friends and family and childhood places and deep familiarity.  I’m very tired from activity and interaction.  But it’s a happy tired, a grateful tired.  Today is a slow day before my return to my other home.  I’ll take a meandering walk or two, not very far, to breathe in the surroundings in this historic city, to appreciate some of the sights and sounds and smells that take me back to the first 20 or so years of my life.

This trip has been a pilgrimage.  These are the places that formed me.  The city where my daddy worked and we shopped.  The crossroads where I grew up surrounded by Daddy’s family.  The church that was the foundation of my faith and spiritual life and the deep roots of ancestral history.  The cemetery where my parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents and great-grandparents are buried.  Visiting with extended family on Easter afternoon.  Seeing high school friends and former students.  Being busy and active and having good company for sharing Savannah and good meals and beautiful scenery.  Seeing and sharing the movie I helped make, the final product of John’s vision that began so many years ago.

It’s almost too much for me to absorb.

So today I’m choosing to be alone to let some of the emotions settle.  Seeing all of these places and people during the final stretch of my breast cancer treatment has been a blessing and has weighted these experiences with many layers of meaning.  So many feelings of past and present joined in this moment.  Renewal and rebirth, memory and gratitude.  Hope for the future and appreciation for the past.

Going home.  Being home.  A time for healing and reflection.