Kathy is the one who sets our courses. She does that literally as she has the GPS. Thank goodness she had needed one for her work of making home visits to new moms and their babies. Before we left we bought a card for the GPS that loaded a map of South Africa. It has truly been invaluable if for nothing else peace of mind! Kathy plugs in the address and off we go.
But she is more of a compass than that. She guides us in many, many more ways than that. With a calmness and gentleness she navigates us through the varied peoples we meet with that leaves them feeling that we are very gracious people when in truth it is really she that has given them that experience. When we play games and Jordan and I get in a tickling fight, her calmness at the edge of our tumbling together will bring us back right.
She reminds us, when we need to be reminded, of where home is of when we need to get a bite to eat and if some harebrained idea I have offered would take us way off course (something she has to do a bit too often, Im afraid). When Kathy laughs we all know its funny. She is always thinking of people back home.
She and I have often thought back to these 27 years we have had together and wonder at the places it has taken us to across the globe. But being with her, no matter how far away (and I can get quite homesick) is like being at home.
She and Conor (the orderly ones) prepare us for the next stage of traveling figuring out how to fit everything in our luggage and what geometric configurations need to be applied in order to fit the luggage in the car. Conor comes by his math and computer science interests clearly from his mother.
Though she must grow weary of all the testosterone around her she very rarely shows it. Instead, she continues to point us toward home both literally and the home that we have with one another.
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