So glad you have signed up to receive the For Random Learning Comes Newsletter! This is the eighty-first edition. Previous editions can be found on the blog's Newsletter page. I send it out weekly, so if you don't get my email on Saturday morning, please let me know! (Check your junk and spam folders too.) *** This week, I have a poem on domestic life and how we miss it when we're gone. It is called Kitchen Care. The picture, by the way, is the loft window of my daughter's tiny kitchen, in the farmhouse of Tudor vintage that she is staying in. I composed it in that relaxed reverie you might have experienced, upon coming home after a trip that, by the end, had begun to feel long enough. We had just come back from England, a trip long-planned and finally executed. Partially, we were there to visit our daughter who works in a garden there, and partially, we were on tour with a group. I hope to talk a little more about the places we visited along the South Coast, but in summary, it was glorious for me and quite tolerable for my husband, and chock-full of historic and literary connections. We had very good weather, for England, for most of our trip. And no one got sick. We managed to survive driving and being driven, on narrow windy roads and harrowing highways and precipitous cliffside ways, with unfamiliar signs. And traffic flowing, for some reason, in the opposite direction you would expect. It reminded me alot of my time in the mountains of North Carolina for the white knuckle anxiety of it. See my poem Flatlander. We endured eight to nine hour flights both ways, but thankfully they went off without a hitch, in a time of strikes in various sectors in England. We ate meals that seemed much too good for us, and visited homes that made us feel smaller still. We longed for tacos. And we met some very lovely people along the way. Thanks to all the people who made that good experience possible. We could not have done it alone. I cannot encompass the wonder of it all in one short missive, but I will try, in the coming weeks. We will not be the same. All the same, it is good to be home. That's all for this week. See you next time around! Andrea

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