I am sitting here rereading some of my posts from the trip and feel like I inhabit two different worlds. Here I am at home in the summer with birds singing (and dogs barking) having just picked a sizable quantity of mixed berries. I hung out two loads of laundry and I managed to plant beans and more cucumbers today and do some preliminary pruning of the bay tree and the middle plum. After 90 minutes at that I was pooped and came in to collapse. Tomorrow I am due to go back to work. My legs hurt and my knees are unreliable.

But then I just spent two months in another life where it is winter and Christmas is a really traditional holiday (which I have never felt here) and people are both worrying about their jobs and trying to do Christmas shopping. I felt comfortable there again probably because the Bear is gone and he was my tie to Australia. I am having some difficulty in my own mind figuring out where I am in my life. The physical part is obviously here and I like buying mangoes and lovely cherries. But I have no trouble whatsoever switching over to US mode. I never get confused about which side of the road to be on, or money, and there were only a few words of Australian that remained stuck in my vocabulary (petrol). Australia sometimes seems so terribly provincial and the US so incredibly egotistical. I don't know how to balance the two sides of my life, especially when there are people I care about on both sides of the Pacific.

I really wish I could shake this illness and feel like I have some degree of energy but it hasn't happened yet, although the cough is less draining and my nose needs blowing less often.