New baby ducklings finally showed up this year in the Boneyard by our house. There are nine of them, swimming excitedly alongside their placid parents. They are late.
Tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. I leave for Peru.
Yesterday, I wrote a school in Huaraz to see about work. They wrote back. I'll be teaching English to young people while I'm there.
Machu Picchu may have to wait. It has patiently done so for the past 40 years I've wanted to go, so I'm not worried.
Last year, there were seven ducklings already swimming by the end of March. I always reported to Lee about the ducklings.
Lee and I were taking walks together in March last year. She couldn't see the ducks swimming below, so I described them to her.
By May, she was in and out of the hospital, taking chemotherapy, having surgeries. There are gaps in my journal. We listened at her bedside to the new Radiohead album with the song "True Love Waits" and the lyrics, "Just don't leave, don't leave..."
We had listened to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's "Purity," something we argued about as we walked Honey in the park. We watched television series – Bosch, Justified, The Good Wife, The Closer – in their entirety. I described the action.
There was so much purpose in every day, so much.
I feel Lee more with me when I'm traveling than when I'm here in our house, where her absence is constantly present.
In Peru, as in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras earlier this year, she will be constantly sprinkling her spirit over me.
I'm grateful and I'm gone.
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