Back from the Holy Land

From May 14-28 we traveled to Israel (with a side trip to Jordan for Christy), which was a great adventure with a 6-mo old. The trip entailed dissertation research for both Michael and Christiana, as well as some sightseeing -- which made every day full of stimulation and logistics, but in good ways. Montana did a great job and Linda Peppard was a great help.

You may notice the time that this post was updated, which is directly attributable to the fact that Montana was a little gem during the trip and has apparently decided to cut some teeth (or so we expect given the volume of her late-night attention-grabbing hollerings). We've posted photos from our trip on Picasa, which can be viewed here.

This past weekend was the one-year anniversary of my father's death, and while his presence and absence were marked for me intermittently over the month of May, we decided to commemorate his life with a BBQ, which included seafood kebabs, guacamole, and a small canister of Bitburger German beer. I think he would have been pleased. I think there is wisdom, too, in Jewish traditions of mourning which set aside the full first year after the death for sustained lament and memorializing. This recognizes that the first year is a liminal time of adjustment and loss, and yes, it can take this long for the reality -- many new realities -- to set in amidst the throngs of memories clamoring to be acknowledged. But there is wisdom too in seeing the passing of a year as significant in the sense that it is time to not only look back, but look forward. And so Sunday morning, as we (still jet-lagged) sat outside on a dewy back porch at sunrise, felt like the dawn of a new year.