Back home

It’s a long way across the Pacific Ocean. The Los Angeles to Sydney flight is 14 hours, and you’re never what sure, having boarded at midnight and arriving at 8am just what time zone you’re in. A day disappears somewhere along the international date line. I got a few hours sleep – more than I usually do on long flights, and arrived with a thrill of exultation as we flew in over Sydney and looped around to make a landing from the north.

I caught a train up to mum’s and it was wonderful to see her. I’ve met some wonderful people this year, but there’s no one like mum. Of course, there never is for anyone. We hugged, we had lunch, and began the catching up on 9 months of news from each other’s lives, though with mum having read the blog and me having phoned every week there wasn’t any news that we hadn’t already shared. But to be there face to face was so good. To eat mum’s homemade soup with its unique turnip-parsnip flavour helped me know that I’m home.

I resisted the temptation to sleep in the afternoon and made it through to 6pm, when I slept, with a few wake ups, for 12 hours. I did well to be able to get back to sleep at all. Usually with jetlag I wake up at 2 or 3am and don’t get back to sleep.

Today, Sunday, I went to Mass with mum, then headed down to Pennant Hills to have a lunch with a dozen of my closest friends, the old St Agatha’s church gang. Riding down on the train it still didn’t feel real that I was back in Australia. It feels like I’m away for the weekend, and that on Monday I’ll be back in class at CTU again. I think seeing my friends here will help to make it feel more concrete.
So, here is where I finish the blog. It was only ever going to be for keeping in touch with family and friends in Australia while I was in Chicago. Perhaps if I had known how cheap phone calls would be I might never have started the blog, but in fact it became a wonderful discipline to make me stop and think how best to tell the story of my life each week. Part of me thinks that perhaps I should keep it up, but I will find other ways, including my personal journal and some group emails to keep on reflecting. This part of the story of my life is over. New chapters begin.