So, the Congo preparation has begun again. My visa application is filled out, and I’m already having quasi-nightmares. Last night, I was at the airport without the following items, which my brain deemed most important: a neck pillow, medicine, and an eye mask. Frantic, I called Jesse to have him bring the items in a backpack. I woke up, told my brain to stop dreaming about Congo. I told it: Stop dreaming about Congo. Then, I fell asleep and dreamed about Congo. The next dream, we were already there, but I was wearing PJs. Then, my travel mates and I sat around in a living room, and no one really spoke to me. They talked to each other, they asked me a question or two, but no one had an actual conversation with me.

Before I fall asleep each night, it seems my mind can do nothing other than think of all the things I have to do in the next few months. Make a doctor’s appointment to get malaria meds, extra prescriptions of antibiotics in case I get sick there, and any vaccines I’m not current on. Get passport photos for the visa application. Buy stuff—hand wipes, bug spray, protein bars. Somehow come up with an ungodly amount of money to pay for all this. (That would be where “support raising” comes in—something I fear I may be allergic to.)

We had our first team meeting last Sunday, and going into it I felt somewhat sick to my stomach. For every bit of excitement I have about going back, I have an equal amount of “Oh crap, what have I done?”

I remember the morning I walked across the Rwanda-Congo border, toward Bukavu. I could literally feel order and reason falling away, like skin shedding off a snake, revealing something bright and something sinister underneath. Congo was chaos, it was manic energy. As we stood outside a squat, yellow building while Bishop and Robin got our visas, we smelled urine and human sweat and something else, something fetid. The air was still and warm. A man hobbled down the street toward us, a growth under his face the size of a couple grapefruits, making him look like one of those caricatures of Jay Leno, an enormous chin, only this was decidedly not funny.

It’s those images that come to mind now, as I go to team meetings and listen as a group of college students say how excited they are to go. I’m on this team because I’ve been before, because they can look at me and say, see, you can go to Congo and be just fine, and because I can tell them to bring a bottle of Cipro and only eat raw vegetables that have thick skins. What I want to tell them is that being in Congo feels like spending two weeks inside a pressure cooker.

But in my dream last night, there was also the lake. The bougainvillea, the mist rising off the jungles, the banana trees, the avocados. There was seeing Fiston again (though my subconscious gave him a mustache—what’s up with that?), seeing Bishop and Mama Lily and everybody. I told the team I was going back for those people, to show them I had not forgotten, that I had not forgotten what I’d seen and heard, that I will never forget.

And so I will fill out the forms and I will send the letters and I will buy the stuff. And I will pack a suitcase and a backpack (hopefully forgetting nothing important). And I will spend two days straight in a series of airplanes. And I will pass the Rwandan hills and fields of tea and clusters of eucalyptus trees. And I will cross the border and feel Congo hit me like a closed fist, and I will hate it and I will love it.

My favorite expressions these days is “through the wringer.” As in, “You’ve been through the wringer lately,” or, “Jesse and I have been through the wringer together.” As in, this sucks. Or, that sucked. Today I feel exhausted and, well, flattened. Yesterday was one of those wringer days.

It actually starts on Thursday night, when Jesse showed me this short film about a three-legged dog who dies. The film (“Last Minutes with Oden”) was well made, and I was fine in the beginning, before I realized that Oden was a dog. The dog who loves and accepts everyone, no matter how outcast they are. The dog who loves his tattooed owner and his balding friends, who doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. A dog who has cancer and is in pain. I lost it when Oden stood, revealing one front leg missing. One thing you must know about me is that I will instantly bawl upon seeing an animal of any variety that is missing a limb. You know that two-legged dog they parade around on talk shows? Yeah. I cry like a baby.

“But why?” Jesse asks. “It’s happy! It’s triumphing over adversity!”

That’s just it. I don’t think I can fully explain it, but there is something about a creature who has never hurt someone, never been obnoxious or rude, who (probably) cannot understand what is happening to it, there’s something about a creature like that, who shouldn’t even have lived, hopping around the stage of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. There’s something about it.

So you can imagine my state as the tattooed man carried the three-legged Oden to the car, as his friends said goodbye, asking the dog to tell Jesus hello for them, as they drove to the vet’s office. As a grown man covered in ink, his hands looking worn and his face gently lined, sobbed on the floor of the vet’s office, sobbed as the needle went into one of the remaining legs, sobbed as the dog closed his eyes, as his head sunk in the man’s hands.

I was a mess.

That was Thursday night, just before bed. Friday started early, because I had the Pampered Chef party to prepare for. The day was normal for about twenty minutes. The sun wasn’t up, not because it was too early for that, but because the sky was a stubborn mess of clouds. I got a phone call with some bad news and spent the rest of the morning a complete mess again. Finally I pulled it together and went to my babysitting job. At which I whimpered again, looking at a precious blond two-year-old and telling him he didn’t need to know about the sad parts of life yet, that he could wait longer for that, knowing he wasn’t understanding what I was saying.

At naptime, I took the boy upstairs and we went through the nap-rituals, and I sang “Old MacDonald” to him as I rocked him, as his head fell back onto my shoulder, heavy and tired. I sang until I ran out of barnyard animals, and then I kept singing, adding things like monkeys and, when I became really desperate, cheese. Finally, I put him in his crib and went downstairs.

The house is a lovely older home, eclectically decorated, with a large window in the kitchen that overlooks the backyard and a series of birdfeeders and squirrel feeders, which are densely populated in the mornings. The neighborhood is nice—no, more than nice. But a couple weeks ago, the boy’s father told me to keep the doors locked if we left for a walk, as there’d been some incidents of people looking for open doors, looking for easy targets for a burglary.

So, after the singing and the sleepy baby, I tiptoed downstairs, a dirty diaper in my right hand to throw into the trash can on the back porch. I walked into the kitchen. Where the back door stood open.

I instantly freaked out, spinning around, sure I would see someone standing behind me. No one was there, so I spun back toward the open door, and then stood frozen in the kitchen, the diaper raised like a weapon. If I were in my own house, I would have grabbed a kitchen knife or a broom or something. But, there, in a house that wasn’t foreign but also wasn’t my own, I just raised the diaper and turned back and forth, from the open door to the rest of the house. The sky outside was still a slate gray, the sun hidden, and the house was dark, except for the weak light from the windows. I listened for a moment, then finally became conscious of the diaper, which I quickly threw away before searching the downstairs for the intruder I thought was surely there.

But the dog was in the playroom, asleep. And I found no one in the house. I pushed the door closed, and locked it, hoping it had opened because of the wind. And for the next two hours I stayed very still and very quiet, listening, watching.

After that, the day was a shocking flurry of errands, which I performed without excitement or drive, my mind preoccupied with the news I received that morning, with the open door, which seemed like an omen. The sky never brightened, the sun having given up at some point in the afternoon, the clouds staying the meanest shade of gray, so that the whole day felt like the morning had never ended, that time was not really passing.

Little things that would normally be annoyingly amusing got under my skin. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, the trunk of my car kept slamming shut, so that by the time I turned to my cart to get another bag, it would blow shut, and I would have to open it again. I finally propped it open with one hand and loaded it with the other, which given my back injuries, the weight of the my trunk lid, and the fact that the remaining purchases were cat litter, soda, and other heavier items, meant I could add a backache to the festivities of the day. When I unloaded the groceries at home, a two-liter tore its bag and landed on my foot. When I went to move a bag of cereal to the pantry, it came open and spilled generic Golden Grahams all over my clean kitchen floor. Oliver took the opportunity to jump onto my clean kitchen counters, and when I chased him to put him into the master bedroom to keep him out of trouble, I skidded onto the carpet next to the dining room table he had run under. Only then did I remember the jeans I wore had holes in the knees. (Knees which, therefore, were rug-burned.)

The evening went on. The house was cleaned, the kitchen prepped, the carpets vacuumed. The party was fun. It wrapped up late and a few girlfriends stayed and we talked some more, and the conversation turned to child predators, and it felt fitting somehow that the day would end there, that the sun would not in fact ever show itself.

And today the sun is out, and all I want to do is go outside in a bathing suit and soak it up, all I want to do is be in warmth, to be internalizing the sun. But I know it’s far too cold for that. I know it will be months before I will warm up. But I also know that summer will come, one day when I’m not expecting it, and I will go to the beach by myself, and I will lie flat, face-up, and spread my arms and feel relief.

* Just notes so I won’t forget

7-86…Daddy was laid off

9-86…Mommy went to work for 3 mos. while Daddy stayed with you

12-86…We sold our house, bought a 2/BR mobile home and moved to Marshall, about 12 mi out of Ripley, WV, Jackson County. Just takes about 20 min. to get to Granny’s in Ravenswood.

1-87…Daddy started electronics school but soon was notified no funds to continue

3-87…Pappy, Daddy, Mommy and Erin went to visit Aunt Bid and Uncle Gene in Orlando, FL. Stayed 2 wks. Erin and Mom got real bad colds.

4-87…Erin developed pneumonia from her cold. I developed an allergy to the sulfa drugs prescribed by a doctor at Drs. Urgent Care in Cross Lanes. We had just gone there for them to check Erin’s ears and throat; that’s when the pneumonia was diagnosed. After 10 days, I developed the allergy, was hospitalized 4 days. Garry went back to FL and we stayed behind to sell trailer, etc.

5-1-87…Garry returned for us; we arrived in Orlando day before Erin’s 4^th birthday

8-15-87…Moved to Titusville, FL. Erin became increasingly sad over losing Bo Bo. It took her about 3 mos. of crying off and on over him.

9-15-87…Enrolled Erin in Titusville Christian School. After a few days, she became very upset at the thought of school. After 6 wks., I took her out of the school.

12-16-87…Pappy and Granny came to visit for 5 wks. Lots of juicy oranges on our tree.

2-88…Erin enrolled in First United Methodist Preschool.

4-88…Started resisting going after being off a lot in March due to illness. I think she was too bashful on the playground; but other factors, too. She’s growing up very fast.

5-7-88…We spent day at Ormond Beach, Pam, Kate, her cousin Annie, Richard, Aunt and Uncle, Garry and I. Kate started breaking out w/chicken pox. Badly sunburned.

5-19…Erin had a few chicken pox on her, then fully broke out next day. No fever. Very uncomfortable, but they did not cover her entire body.

6-88…We have been looking for a house for a couple or more months. Interest rates were at 9 ½; now at 10.58 and rising.

Today, I spent several hours at two different occasions on the phone with two of the smartest, kindest, most creative people I know. I feel charged up and inspired. Funny, it just struck me that they are both writers, and they’re both blonde. If there were any two women to slaughter the stereotypes of the ditzy blonde, it’s Simona and Visha.

Simona’s hair is light and wispy, wavy in just the right way, and it always looks perfect, like a halo. I once saw her after she’d spent the day at the beach, and her hair had taken on a windswept look that stylists spend hours creating for movie stars in movies about coastal romance. When I spend the day at the beach, my hair stands straight on end, the frizz propping up the rest of my hair in what I can only describe as Wind Tunnel Chic (well, without the “Chic” part). Simona speaks in an almost-whisper, with such a calming voice I always feel like everything will be just fine, if only because she is in the world. She talks about spirituality, about reality, about Congo and Darfur, and she quotes literature and tells me about philosophy, always having the decency to pretend that I already knew the complex concepts she’s outlining for me, listing off philosophers as if I know exactly who she’s talking about and might chime in with a reference to the philosopher’s third book, which I just happened to have read last week (when she talks about Kierkegaard, however, I do get rather animated). And in return for her brilliance, I tell her about my book, the fits and starts and endless rewrites, and she does not think my existence invalid because I don’t have a full-time job with benefits.

Visha’s hair is straight and strawberry blonde, and she’s got this wonderful radio voice, distinctive, a little husky, memorable. She’s spunky and fiery, but incredibly and unfailingly reasonable. She knows how many female directors have been nominated for Best Director in the Oscars, and she has trained two very large dogs into thinking that she—petite, adorable Visha—is bigger than they are. I think she’s magic. And funny, dear heavens, have I mentioned that Visha’s hilarious? If you know her, you already know she’s got a sharp wit, but you also know that she’s unendingly kind. Though I’ve given her plenty of ammunition, never once has she used that humor to make fun of me or to make me feel anything other than entirely good and happy. She cries for people with Alzheimer’s, and she pulls off the side of the road to care for dying dogs hit by cars that long ago sped off. She works at a bookstore, has read probably more books than said bookstore has in its inventory, knows all about experimental film, rails against injustice, defends the defenseless.

How lucky I feel today, not only to have such friends, but to have hours to run down my phone batteries with them, to listen to them and to talk about writing with them, to find out what they think about plot and beginnings and the plight of the MFA workshop. The three of us are trying to do the same thing, really, to struggle with the words on the page, to find the balance between art and life, to find where the line is and to cross it.

Productivity is up, folks, and the last few days of last week were very satisfying. I made my “six things” lists each night and slashed at them each day. I kept myself off Facebook during “business hours.” The laundry and dishes are done. Thank-you notes were written and sent. Emails were tackled. Groceries were purchased.

On Thursday night, I met with my Pod People and implemented some ideas Sue gave me. On second Thursdays, we meet at the church, and as nice as the environment can be, it’s just not the same as meeting in someone’s house. Our dinner parties of late last year were loads of fun for me, and for them too, I hope. So, to work around the less-than-ideal environment, I brought an old comforter that I spread on the floor under a giant fake tree at the entrance to the kids’ ministry section. I brought a vase of daisies and poured out a bag of individually wrapped dark chocolates. I lit a lavender candle (that Sue gave me!). We lounged, picnic-style, and talked about their groups, the successes and the challenges. Much better, I thought, than sitting in chairs.

Today, I spent the entire morning and most of the afternoon preparing for our taxes, reading up on the self-employment tax, SEP IRAs vs. individual 401ks, deductions for business expenses, the endless debate on which is better, Vanguard or Fidelity (any ideas? I’ve heard Vanguard has lower fees…). When my brain could take no more, I crashed on the futon, fully intending to read but falling asleep before getting up the energy to crack open the book. I was covered with this fluffy robe my parents gave me for Christmas, and Oliver was curled up next to me, purring. Bliss.

So, the year in review, twenty-ten so far: Watching kids who are growing faster than I realize. When they’re this size (“this size” being dangerously close to age two), I don’t perceive that very much is changing on a week-to-week basis, but I have a feeling that the year will breeze by and in January of ’11 I’ll think back to now and murmur to myself, My, how fast they’ve grown. Or something else suitably nostalgic and maternal.

Also, The Great Calendar Hunt of Twenty-Ten. I thought I’d be clever and wait until after New Year’s to get my calendar. Thought I’d get a good deal. Ha. Apparently, in a recession, everyone waits until January for their new wall calendars. The selection at Barnes and Nobel consisted of Betty Boop, Playboy, and Twilight. None of which I want on my kitchen wall. So, after a day of searching in what apparently were all the wrong places, I went home calendar-less. Which, for me, means: disoriented and slightly panicked, with no idea what she’s supposed to be doing the next day.

After much lament, I decided to give my computer’s calendar program another whirl. In the past, I just haven’t warmed to the digital calendar. But this year might be different. Twenty-ten, you know, it’s the future. Right? And of course, since deciding this and taking the time to set up my recurring appointments and obligations, I found plenty of calendars, all half-off, just lying around waiting to be bought by me. But I still want to give the (free) iCal a chance, a really fair shake this time. And paying six bucks for a wall calendar when January is practically over (okay, fine, almost half over) makes me feel I just won’t be getting my money’s worth. You don’t just get those two weeks back.

And there’s the Pampered Chef party I’m having next Friday. (If you’re in town, come over. If not, order kitchen stuff here: http://www.pamperedchef.biz/amydegler — just put in “Erin Bond” and buy stuff! I want free kitchen accessories! I’m poor!) Sending postcards and setting up online invites and realizing I really have to have my house cleaned up by then. Just tonight I finally did the last load of laundry from the holidays. Said load is still in the dryer and must be put away, but I’m nearly there…

Tonight was nice—easy, calming, a late dinner of bone-in chicken breasts roasted in garlic butter, and one or our favorites, corn maque choux, a creamy, buttery, tangy mess of deliciousness. Corn maque choux is comfort food at its ideal—even making it is comforting. Chopping the onion and the red pepper, slicing the kernels off the corncobs, stirring in the cream. While the chicken roasted, I prepped everything on the enormous butcher block that came home with me over the holidays. It’s so nice and big that I could push each veggie off to the side while I chopped the next one. When it was time to make the dish, I just scooped each new ingredient into my hands and dumped it into the waiting pan. Like a cooking-show host, just without the cool glass bowls.

The slow evening was the perfect follow up to a blissfully productive day. I had a meeting with Sue, who has agreed to mentor me in leadership, and she’s just a brilliant woman. Girl knows her stuff. I’m doing this for the pod, because I want it to be incredible, because I want us all to grow, because I want twenty-ten to be transformative, to have an unstoppable momentum. And Sue was perfect; I left her place charged up and ready to go. We talked about vision, about leading with the end in mind, about scheduling, about communication, about flowers. (More on that later.) I came home and made a master task list and got to work, not allowing myself to get on Facebook until this evening. Tonight, before bed I’ll make my “six things” list for tomorrow, the six things that must get done (and no more, so I won’t get frustrated if I don’t finish the list).

Until today, twenty-ten has felt busy without being particularly productive, freezing cold with no snow, time passing both quickly and slowly. Is January not over yet? Memories of a rough January last year. But it’s supposed to be sixty-four on Friday, and tomorrow I’ll have six things that will get done, and disappointments will eventually fade into memories, and there’s a whole year of changes still in this story.

Our trip to Florida started, well, shall we say unconventionally. Usually we leave for Florida during the week before Christmas and head back north before New Year’s. This year, Jesse had to work Christmas Eve, so plans were rearranged to accommodate. Both Jesse and I decided to add to the fun by coming down with a seasonal cold just before leaving. So, I spent my Christmas Eve packing, wrapping presents, loading up the car, and running last-minute errands, singing Christmas tunes at the top of my sick little lungs while driving all over Wilmington to snag things I’d forgotten earlier in the week, still managing to sneak in for one of the Christmas Eve services at church in between the craziness for a nice hour to focus and chill out a bit.

(To the list of things I can’t do well while on cold medicine, add “carrying a tune.” Those Christmas songs have never been so mangled.)

Around 8:00 p.m., everything was done at last and we loaded the cats in their carriers, set them up in the backseat of the too-full car, and drove off—gulping down cold medicine, sucking on cough drops, and hoping what little energy we had wouldn’t give out too early. That morning, I’d plotted out our overnight stay options (there was no way we were making the drive overnight). I had a list of hotels that accepted pets at two-, three-, four-, and five-hour intervals. On our way out, I wanted to hit the McDonald’s drive-thru for some cheap coffee, but they were closed, of course. A cold Starbucks drink from a gas station had to do.

The good thing about driving late on Christmas Eve night is that no one else was crazy enough to be driving then. We had the roads to ourselves. We made remarkably good time. At three and a half hours in, I realized we were about a half hour away from the five-hour hotels. For a few minutes, I thought, well heck we could just keep on driving. But, I hadn’t plotted out many hotels after the five-hour mark, and I hate going door-to-door with hotels trying to find one that took cats, so we just planned on stopping when we got to one on our list. A few minutes after we decided this, I started to crash. Wait, no, not the car. Physically, speaking. My eyelids felt itchy and dry. My legs ached, and my feet tingled. When you’re sick, nights are the worst, and it just hit me all at once. We still had about twenty minutes to go. I counted every mile.

Finally, we saw our exit and pulled off the highway. I was just about cross-eyed while getting our keys, and I didn’t process a word the hotel clerk said to me. She could have told me the room cost $300 and check-out was at 5:30 a.m. and I would have just nodded and grunted my approval, shuffling out the door, plastic card-keys in hand.

I drove down to the end of the building to park near where I thought the hotel clerk had told me to go (though I couldn’t be sure), and as soon as we got out of the car, it started to rain so hard I felt like I’d been hit with a bucket of water. Like a high school coach whose team just won a big game. Bam! We frantically pulled the cats out of the car—along with a litter box, litter, and a couple plastic bags of overnight things—and ran to a pitiful little awning that barely covered the back door to the hotel’s hallway, struggling with our plastic keys and dripping cold rainwater, arms full and cats yowling their displeasure.

Inside, I set the cats up with a litter box and water. I had hunted for one of those one-time-use litter boxes, but hadn’t found one, so I’d bought the smallest, cheapest box Wal-Mart had. It would have to do.

I silently congratulated myself for getting us to the hotel in one piece and in such good time, attributing our expediency to the fact that I had driven seven miles an hour over the speed limit, rather than the four over Jesse typically drives. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I peeled off my wet clothes and took a hot shower. Ah, sweet relief. The night had been a little rough, but we’d made it. I could still breathe through my nose—quite the accomplishment—and I was warm and dry and had a fairly decent bed waiting for me. We turned out the lights, and I thought I’d pass out in about five minutes flat.

Well. I was wrong.

First of all, our upstairs neighbors were (I’m assuming from the noises they were making) very obese people performing interpretive dance. Or, they were jumping from the bed to the floor and back again. Or, they were running in circles. Or, a combination of all the above. I’ve heard some strange things in hotel rooms at night before, but nothing like this. It was entirely perplexing. I considered calling the front desk but was too exhausted to sit up and place the call. I kept hoping they’d quiet down. The cats, too, were disturbed by the noise and, curious about the hotel room, they spent the night roaming, jumping from the bed to the floor and back again themselves.

Soon, though, I realized the people—or animals?—upstairs were not the loudest or most annoying thing we’d deal with that night. Apparently, our room butted up against a flimsy fence, which separated the parking lot from a gas station. At which people in what sounded like monster trucks liked to congregate on Christmas Eve night…well, technically Christmas morning by now. They revved their trucks, they yelled at one another, they made all sorts of loud and obnoxious sounds. I believe you could say they were carousing. In the middle of the night. On Christmas. Next to our hotel room. When we really, really needed the sleep.

When we “woke up” the next morning (to wake up implies being asleep, and I’m not entirely sure we were), I felt worse than I had the day before. I was back to breathing out of my mouth, which gave me a constant look of the half-dead, or half-asleep, my mouth hanging open in a somewhat doleful manner. As we got ready to leave, Gracie jumped into the litter box and proceeded to pee on the floor. The poor thing—she really thought she was peeing in the box (she even turned around to “cover” it), but her aim was completely off. So, we cleaned up the pee and threw away the rest of the litter.

And then I did something that will forever make me cringe in hotel showers. I washed the litter box…in the shower. With the hotel shampoo. Gross, gross, gross. I know. But what else could I do? I was too cheap to leave the litter box there. I had paid five bucks for that thing. Which, to be fair, was probably the same price I would have paid for the disposable box. But still, there was the principle of the matter. This was a non-disposable box that I had paid for. So, the shower it was. I hoped the shower got cleaned between guests, but I feared it didn’t.

After a sad breakfast of off-brand hotel cereal, bad orange juice, and decongestants, we gassed up the car and got back on the road. Most of the drive was rainy and more crowded than the day before. But we were still making good time, even though Jesse was driving all of three miles an hour slower than I’d driven the night prior. At the Florida line, the sky cleared and the sun came out, and though I felt physically wretched, my spirits were high.

About an hour away from my parents’ house, where we planned to deposit the cats before leaving for Jesse’s parents’ place for a Bond-Seabolt Christmas dinner complete with my aunt in from California and my grandmother, we stopped at a rest area for a bathroom break. As we walked back to the car, I thought, I should look over the car, just to make sure nothing’s wrong. I sometimes think things like this because I’m paranoid. What if we blew a tire? What if something heinous were hanging off the back of our car? What if something crucial had come loose? I always check, mostly amused by my neuroses and happy to see that I worried for nothing, again.

Only this time, one of our rear tires was completely flat.

I thought about the air compressor my dad had given me for my car a few years back. Which I’d failed to pack in Jesse’s car. It was in my car, in my garage, at home. And the spare tire was in Jesse’s trunk. Under our luggage. Which was under a set of golf clubs. Which was under a mound of Christmas presents, my laptop and camera, pillows, a set of towels, a fresh set of clothes to change into that evening…

It all came out. Our belongings strewn on the sidewalk for people to look over as they gawked at us while walking their Pomeranians. Jesse, wearing an old t-shirt and ripped jeans because they were the only ones not packed in the big suitcase, changed the tire and threw the stuff back in the trunk. We crawled along I-95, afraid to blow the donut, and eventually showed up on my parents’ doorstep, my hair frizzy from the Florida humidity, Jesse’s hands dirty. Our mouths hanging half-open, we sniffed a congested “Merry Christmas” and collapsed on their couch. Sleep-deprived, sicker than we’d been before the trip, and bearing gifts with crumpled bows, we must have been a sight, but we hardly cared. We were finally, finally home.