A person can live for a surprisingly long time on cashews, dates, and Turkish figs.

Those unlikely commodities sustained me through a grumpy flight attendant; three wild rides in wheelchairs pushed by attendants with varying degrees of passion for their jobs; and a harrowing six-mile journey down a winding levee road.  Now they serve as breakfast, along with a packet of tea from the zip-lock bag of such packets given to me by a dear friend.

The cabin in which I write reminds me of a hotel room near Custer State Park where my son, his stepfather, and I stayed in February of 1999.  Or was it 2000?  Never mind:  it had the feel of the room surrounding me.  Tile, Formica, and 1960’s cupboards comprise the kitchenette here, just as they did in that hotel room.  We nearly persuaded ourselves to make our permanent home in that place.  Two rooms had been thrown together to make something wheel-chair accessible out of one.  A little playground stood adjacent to the square of cement which served as a patio.  We could have died there and been unphased by our own demise.

Just so here:  A cabin in the Delta Bay RV Park and Campground in Isleton, California.  I’m sixty miles east of my Pacific, on the San Joaquin River.  The air outside carries no sound.  To the east, the sun has just started to rise, joining me, two hours late for breakfast.

I couldn’t be calmer.  In a half-dozen hours, my tiny house on wheels will make her way to the Delta, pulled by Kevin Kitsmuller in the company of his wife Kim.  I will be at the gate to welcome Angels’ Haven to her new home.

I don’t pretend to know the future.  I’ve been called crazy, foolish, traitorous, and wild.  Guilty as charged.  I will leave a lot behind me but one always does, as one steps forward.   To those who love me, each of you in his or her own way, in the peculiar way of each relate, know this:   I carry your heart with me; I carry it in my heart.

It’s the tenth day of the forty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.