I’m so happy to be safely back home.

It was kind of surreal to find myself wandering around Phantom Ranch for the past four days.

I first went there 40 years ago, and much of it is the same as I remember it. We had the place to ourselves, so that was different.

Can you believe I faced some fears going back there? There was nothing to be afraid of, but 20 year old me was afraid of everything.

They’re in between seasons, and soon the whole camp will be full of campers again. Still, it felt a little bit like a ghost town, and I’m glad of that!

I visited the porch where I was eating my birthday breakfast when I got a phone call telling me that my grandmother had died. Until this week, that was my last day at camp. I packed up my stuff that morning and left for Maine. It was July of 1983.

I was sitting on the dock there when I learned “righty tighty, lefty loosy.”

I had forgotten the smell of camp.

It’s a good smell of oak trees and closed up cabins.

I keep having opportunities to revisit places from my past. Not only revisit, but explore, and then gently close the lid.

Once again, I have been happy to stand back and watch my daughter connect with her birth family.

An adopted person once accused me of ripping my daughter from her mother’s arms, and told me I was wrong to say she was mine at all.

My daughter’s birth mother and I have both played a role in her upbringing, and what we have now is a large and loving rainbow colored family.

We each keep our separate treasured memories of this lifelong process. We have both nurtured her and brought her safely to this day.

Today our hearts are heavy. All we can do is try to carry on in spite of sadness. We hold each other. We have no guarantee of tomorrow, just hearts full of memories, and this day. This day to open our eyes and see each other. To open our hearts and decide. To love… to be a family.

I stand back and observe. I see a room full of people that look just like her.

Because of her, these are my people, too.

September 17, 2020, I wrote a blog post entitled Circles.

In July, I revisited my childhood home. Then I almost purchased a building I used to own. In September, I performed a wedding at the house where I spent my wedding night back in 1990.

I had a feeling I would be seeing more historic sites from earlier times in my life. I didn’t know where or how, but I was working on a book which is now at the printers, called Rear View Mirror. I write. After my first book came out a couple of years ago, I just kept writing. Rear View Mirror continues right where My Hand Paints left off. It naturally became more of a look back on my life, but still talking about the themes of creativity and painting.

Tomorrow, I am setting out on an unexpected trip, and I will be staying for four nights at the summer camp I worked at the summers of 1980, 1982 and 1983.

I wasn’t ready for this until now.

It is special for me to be able to share these places and memories with my kids. Doubling back helps me to put my life into perspective. I am embracing times that I have not talked or even thought much about for various reasons.

In my twenties, I had a negative outlook. If I felt disappointed, I blamed others and avoided working on underlying issues. I often felt disappointed. I had a habit of shutting those people out of my life, and moving on. I didn’t look back. But I carried that dysfunction with me. I was a poor communicator, and hurt people along the way.

I think things would have been much easier and happier for me if I had learned to say what I thought much earlier.

Well. It doesn’t work like that. I can’t go back and change who I was. Nor do I choose to feel guilty for those times I can not change. So I reach out, the best I can, to friends I abandoned at the next exit. I’m not that way anymore.

I understand if it’s too late. If it’s too little to say I’m sorry.

It is not too late for me.

I can forgive myself and do things differently now.

The reason for this trip is a sad one. A tragic one, that we again, unfortunately can not change. And so we bring our heavy hearts, and I will look for any lesson, any gift in this grief. We go to remember the dead, but we go for the living.

It’s hard for me to remember what I hoped to become as an adult. To think back on my childhood aspirations now, I would be looking through the filter of everything I have experienced in life.

I have memory images of being a child, but as much as I feel I relate to, or wish I relate to the childhood version of me, I’m superimposing the subsequent decades over that memory.

What I remember best is right now, and I wonder if I even have this right.

The summer I turned seven and the summer I turned nine, I was sent to the home of an angry aunt and uncle, because my parents were overseas.

I do not know, nor can I imagine, how this particular aunt and uncle were selected to care for my brother and me.

I told my cousin I wish the adult me could have cared for the child me. It was one of those things I said in a chat without really thinking about it. Once I said it, it really got to me.

If I had a time machine, that is what I would most like to do. Go back and care for the child that I was.