These are comments not complaints on missionary life.

I’ve been a bit off lately, not in my usual norm. I haven’t been waking up to see the sunrise and there are no plants to water on the balconies, no need to straighten our couch covers, or to sweep under the kitchen table while my coffee is brewing. Although I do manage to find a few other "under kitchen tables" that need a bit of a sweep and somehow trick my body back into its usual norm for a moment.

I don’t have the regular everyday of being with the same people, people who know me well and to whom I belong in an everyday sort of way. I don’t have the pillow that works for me with the particularities of my particular way of carrying stress in my left shoulder/neck area. And the beds are different, some soft, some hard, some leaky in the case of an air mattress. Jim is missing, he is my particularly favorite man.

When I cook, the pans are in different places and I’m not just following the mood of my heart and the ingredients on hand, but I’m also opening and closing cupboard doors over and over again, and wondering about other people’s kitchens and why they put things in certain places..adding that to my cooking rhythm.

Everything is in English.  It’s cold and although I’ve been told it also rains in Bangkok, and that there are gloomy days, my romantic heart claims that truly there is only sunshine.

On the other hand, there is a different normal here, something from an earlier time and there are new adventures as well. Saturated blues and greens at this latitude and cheese in everyone’s fridge is something I used to know well. I like the different books in different bookshelves. I hear what is still my new grandma name and and I love these, my non-everyday people.  People that were in my every day once upon a time, my deep down people that have lately been deep down but hard-to-feel-connected-to people.  These particular people sometimes have left me at odds with myself and so I am coming home.  Its time now, after a couple weeks of shocked existence, to hunker down and find this normal.