I’ve been out of the loop for a couple weeks! Two weeks ago, I finished Round 2 of my manuscript and sent it off to the professor I met at the New York State Writers Institute for her to read a second time.

Then, last week I stepped off the carousel in Massachusetts and jumped on another one in Iowa to help my mom and my family. Mom was in the hospital for a week with a nasty infection in her colon. She’s home and on the mend, and I’m back on the carousel in Massachusetts.

However, my marbles aren't back in order yet. I'm struggling a bit with dichotomy of place. I spent a week waking up to wide horizon sunrises — and on one particularly cold morning, this spectacular double sunrise.

Then, early Sunday morning, I saw the hot pink morning ball breaking through a cloud on the horizon of Lake Michigan, the Chicago skyline sleepily nestled in the foreground. With a strong tailwind, that flight out of O’Hare was the shortest ever back to Boston, an hour and forty minutes.

Unlike my normal landings at Boston’s Logan Airport, when I avert my eyes from the view, I glued my eyes to the window, forcing myself to watch and to hold confidence in the pilot as we glided what looked like only a few feet over the water. I held tight convincing myself that a smooth landing strip would soon appear and catch the jet's tires.

The abruptness of this change in location — from calling one place “home” and then having less than a two-hour flight out of the Midwest to “home” 1,600 miles away — has left me reeling a bit, looking for firm footing on “place.”

So, stringing a line of words together to form a sentence is a challenge. Let alone a few paragraphs. Perhaps next week.

All is well... I’m home.