Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig

I use this title in exactly the sense implied by the little androids who chant it in Blade Runner : they're staggering, disoriented and not too bright. We got in at 0300 hours, to a house in which the furnace had quit working a day or two ago, crawled under the covers and sank into oblivion. We had been traveling (or hanging about airports) since the taxi picked us up in Atenas at 1130 local time, and were done. Like deliriously tired, slightly squiffy, airported-out dinner. In a deep freeze.

Rick, the very helpful plumber/furnace/boiler man from Rick's Plumbing - where else - has just left, and the furnace is now running. A part I replaced 5 years ago went belly up about a week after he replaced the igniter, which tanked a day after we left for Costa Rica. We're not done yet; whoever put the system in before we bought the house did not install components scaled to the size of the house and things need to be changed. But by doing so, the furnace will run less and the heat it does make will be more evenly and efficiently distributed throughout the house.

This has nothing to do with Costa Rica, and everything to do with how life hits you the moment you come back. The banal sameness of the world you know silently closes over your head a few hours after you return. But right now there are people at Rest. La Trilla, eating food in the night breezes that will nail them to their chair with sumptuous excess for ... $8.50 or so a person. There are people sitting and talking in the park under the palms. There is someone driving a car that came from the factory with the words Spanish Fly on the hatch, and probably not using his turn signals. Clean air and crowded buses and fresh fruit and mountains off in the distance and rising to the clouds.
There is surf (maybe) lightly sloshing the playa under the moon (definitely) and someone walking in it. Sol might be in the pool, or Danny, if he is back from camp. Costa Rica hasn't gone anywhere; we have just gone from it.




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