Since then, for the record, I have crossed the Atlantic 4 times. I've been to Lindau, München and Sindelfingen (Stuttgart), to London and Cardiff and back to Ottawa. The day after we returned, on December 15th, my mother died. I'll write more about it, eventually. Between that day and the day of Mum's funeral (January 10th) came Christmas, which I hardly noticed with so much else to think about, although our friends Elva and Laurie were very kind to us on Christmas Day, allowing us a moment of tranquillity over a lovely Christmas dinner at their house, with a log fire in their living room. We felt exhausted. On January 7th I was back in the plane to London, returning (after the funeral) on January 13th. In Ottawa I had to hit the ground running, as the cliché has it, in order to finish editing the February edition of CFUW-Ottawa's newsletter and get it published on time. That, while fighting a virus of some kind, was also exhausting. The outside air temperature felt like -35 C for a few days, which didn't help.
It wasn't all bad. Among the good things were a couple of gemütlich and stimulating meetings with my German-speaking friends, swimming at the Chateau, walking in crunchy snow, flying over the hills in the Cessna, playing the accompaniments to our Schubert songs, seeing the special exhibition of Paul Klee paintings at our National Gallery and highly entertaining documentary film about four famous British actresses. On January 25th I had another treat, a horse-drawn sleigh ride after snowshoeing.
I'm writing this in Bristol, in a hotel room with my husband who's about to join the annual SSS (Safety-Critical Systems Symposium), having flown to England again on February 1st.
*****
That was not such a long post after all, a mere summary. My next post will go back to our week in Germany at the beginning of December.
No comments:
Post a Comment