Catching up...

So it's been a while and the visit with Lecram is what it took to get me back to blogging.  What, you may ask, kept me away in the first place?

Well, I was walking to blogland carrying a basket full of goodies one day when a hungry wolf jumped out of the bushes and....hhmm, no. Let's try again.

Well, when we left off back in November 2015, I was working in a couple urban elementary school libraries one of which had been unceremoniously moved to a stage at the end of a gymnasium.  They did however bring back full-time librarians so I was no longer working alone.  Sadly, The librarian I was assigned to share the stagebrary with was...hhmm...shall we say, less than competent or committed to providing good service.  It was the straw that broke the camel's back for me and I began looking for new employment closer to home.

A job I had applied for and not gotten a year earlier was posted again and though I was annoyed with the poor communication from them the year before I got over myself and applied once again.  I was called for an interview and admittedly carried the attitude of Morgan Freeman's character Red in The Shawshank Redemption when he goes before the parole board the final time. I reasoned they took a pass on me when I behaved well so what did I have to lose but if they hired me no one could say they didn't know what they were getting into with me. I was a bit stunned to be hired.

So just over a year ago I bid farewell to my beloved teachers and students in the urban elementary schools.  I was given a truly loving send off and shed copious amounts of tears. I traded an hour commute in heavy highway traffic for a fifteen minute commute on rural roads, full time-pay that netted me less than Calypso earned scrubbing toilets in a hotel, for part-time pay that was netting me a good bit more, and a filthy stagebrary where I had a broken laptop and basketballs flew in and knocked books off shelves for a gleaming new library with lots of natural light and all the tools I actually needed to do my job.  If I hadn't taken the job you'd have to wonder if one too many basketballs made contact with my noggin while I shelved books.

There was this little problem of aching for my elementary kids and friends back at the old school.  So I decided I'd go back as a volunteer once a month to read to classes. Though lots of people questioned the sanity of that choice it's been a good thing.  I get my little kid fix, I get to see the friends I made, I provide a respite from some of the nonsense they all deal with, and then I go home.  In other words, I get all the fun without all the bullshit that weighed me down when I was an employee there.  At the same time, with a little distance I see how horribly dysfunctional the whole situation is there and when I start lamenting how bored I can get in my current position a visit gives me enough of a dose of the mess to remember how fortunate I am to be in a better situation.

So that's the professional chapter.

The personal chapter has been.....interesting.  Last summer Logophile came to visit and we took Philadelphia and turned it upside down.  We had a fantastic time! Then after twenty years, I finally got my entire crew back to my beloved Trinidad.  I had been back a couple times in between there but it had been twenty years for my girls and my son had only been there in utero. It was a rich and wonderful time for us all to share together with each other and with the friends there who are more like family.

There has been the strange space of learning to parent adult children as they navigate their own joys and dilemmas, both big and small. There is the equally strange space of watching our own parents age, decline, and losing Mr. Lime's mother. The shifting shapes of family as some ties strengthen and others weaken for a variety of reasons makes for an interesting range of different perspectives on old events and new directions.

The strangest space of all has been the effect of finally deciding it's time to search for my birthmother,  the process of finding her, and the psychedelic warp of perspective that has offered.