The house is unusually quiet. Christmas vacation is over. The kids are back at school. The baby is sleeping. My parents were here for a week and left last night. I started to take down Christmas decorations after our Epiphany celebration yesterday. I have nothing on the calendar until the 2:45 school pick up and then tennis lessons, my first class, and picking up the older boys after Mock Trial in the evening. Back to business.
My parents flew out of LAX last night, which is about 65 miles from our house. The drive can take anywhere from an hour and fifteen minutes to more than two hours depending on traffic. I thought about sending my folks on the shuttle bus, but since their flight was late enough that I could leave all the kids with Dad, I drove them into town to extend our visit a little longer. Traffic was moving, and the drive home was almost too short. Just over an hour of near silence in the dark was relaxing, even if I did have to keep part of my brain attentive to traffic. I now have done this drive enough that I can almost go on auto pilot. As I crested the top of the hill nicknamed "the grade" and was greeted with the expansive view of Camarillo at nighttime, a sense of both glory and dismay washed over me. All the lights are beautiful as they sparkle in the valley, but all the lights!
That valley is home and not home. In another six or seven months we will be moving again, not closer to family and friends who are almost family as we had hoped, but farther away. We'll be staying in California and moving three hours south to the San Diego area. No orders are in hand yet, but that's the word being passed around. More on that when we have something in writing.
For my literature class on Monday night, I read Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" and Yeats' "The Magi." Both poems allude to the complexity of emotions the Wise Men might have felt when coming before a baby in a stable who was supposed to be a great king and whom they were supposed to condemn to death through Herod. Glory and dismay.
Our feast for Epiphany was a bit subdued since we had to go to the airport. Supper was chili, but for accompaniment, I made Rosca de Reyes from a recipe a Spanish friend gave me when we lived in Illinois. It is kind of a complicated recipe, but this batch turned out well - it's more like a sweet egg bread with a sugary topping that includes candied citrus peel than a cake. Some of my peels were sweet, others - perhaps they had too much of the pith or weren't ripe fruits - were still slightly bitter. Those few bites threatened to overshadow the deliciousness. Chiaroscuro is everywhere.
Now for a brief photographic record of our past weeks. How quickly the vacation days flew by after the long days of anticipation!
 |
| Tamale fest fun. I love tamales!! |
 |
| HS band concert |
 |
| Frugal family fun at the hardware store instead of a tree farm. |
 |
Elementary Christmas musical. Questionable Silent
Night rap and interminable pre-school number, otherwise better than
last year. Son number 4 had a solo. |
 |
| Son number 3's gift to Baby |
 |
| The exchange of sibling gifts before Midnight Mass |
 |
| The Midnight Mass crowd |
 |
| Christmas morning procession with all the nativity sets' Infant Jesuses. |
 |
| Baby's first Christmas Joy |
No comments:
Post a Comment