There and Back Again

18 October 2022

Coming home was a team effort. The horses were not involved, but Becca herded all our suitcases through the airports, because my oft-problematic back decided to go on strike the morning of our departure. Some of you know this was a worry of mine going into the trip. I’m grateful that pain didn’t interrupt any of our explorations in Türkiye. Still, the eleven-hour flight was a negotiation of neck braces and hot water bottles. 

Our friends Jody and Katrina picked us up at O’Hare, punch-drunk from a 22-hour day, and after some good Iraqi food, our friends Sam and Sammy put us up in a Wheaton hotel. The next day we rode back to Indianapolis with the Ito family, waylaid by road construction and country roads. We stumbled across our own threshold a little past nine on Sunday night. The house seemed impossibly spacious and familiar things looked a little strange.

For me, Monday meant physical therapy and my first afternoon back as a sustainability educator. It meant those things for Becca too, because I needed help with both of them. I’m happy to report that I’m making progress in the field of Being Able to Turn My Head. Today, Becca jumped back into teaching Latin. I think she made a game of guess-the-capital with her students, but I didn’t hear much about it before she went down for a nap.

Capitals in Niksar, once known as Neocaesarea. This was the city of Macrina’s childhood.

 There was a dusting of snow this morning, and the maples and dogwoods are brilliant. I prayed the liturgy for fiction writers and started revising my maps of Annisa. Mostly I was adding fruit trees. I’m so excited to start the sixth draft of The Sun in Slender Glass. I finished the story in draft four and fixed plot holes in draft five. Draft six will be the one that knows about lavender moths and the crunch of white snail shells on stony ground, the one fitted to the topography of Uluköy and Niksar.

I almost feel like the kitchen is full of peaches again. This trip was that rich—the wealth of things I hoped to learn and the surprise of gifts unasked-for, coming away like a fruit in the hand. Our phones are full of pictures and my notebooks full of words. Synthesizing it all seems daunting—but joy to joy to joy, it’s work to savor. I think Becca feels similarly about the pottery.

 I’ll ask her when she wakes up.

Last hurrahs in Istanbul: the fast-food flatbread shop was about six hundred years old and it had this chandelier

Last hurrahs in Istanbul: the windswept Bosphorus

A sunset ride in Cappadocia