"A Longing Fulfilled is Sweet to the Soul"-Proverbs 13:19

We've returned,but the good grace of God for 2 weeks to Scotland. Back to the Seamill Centre where B & I lived and worked for a year about 6 years ago. I was the groundskeeper on 4 acres at an international Christian missionary training center. B was the housekeeper, which people here thought made for a funny switcheroo, me with the gas powered tools and the steel-toed boots and B with the dust rags and the toilet brushes. But it somehow suited our personalities, and I know he cherished as I did the teams of students we got to organize and lead for 2 hours each day. People from all over the world live, work and study here, staff and students together from many different cultures. We are leading a team of gardeners from our church in SC, to work in the grounds of the base and in the village with the local Environmental Group. It will be brilliant! (Cue drum solo from Ground Force).
Cookies, Lost
Of all the ways I dreamed of returning to the Seamill Centre, holding handfuls of sick was not one of them. Poor little G! Right as we were turning into the Seamill parking lot she started retching. The 15 hour plane ride and then the windy Dalry road made her delicately puke up the dried apricots I gave her for breakfast. She soon recovered, and I quickly washed up.

My last few days have been harrowing to say the least; prolonged airplane travel with young children is not for the faint of heart. Little Hecho managed to sleep 1 hour out of 15 (guess who joined him in that feat of non-somnolence?)
Another highlight had to be right at the end of our first leg of the journey, San Francisco to Philadelphia. Just as we were landing, it became very clear that Hecho needed a new nappy, very soon. B nipped into the lavatory across the aisle as soon as we were allowed to get up from our seats. The door slid open. "Got a change of clothes?" he asked, looking slightly nauseous. "It should be in the diaper bag!" I shot back, a trifle strained. There then ensued frantic searching and then the sickening realization that while the spare clothes had truly been in the bag at one time, they had been moved. By someone who will remain deeply contrite, but nameless. So there we were in the Philadelphia airport with a baby wearing naught but a diaper. We got many fun looks as I pushed him around, looking for clothes. It turns out all his original pants needed was some judicious scrubbing, so we were okay.
Dreams 
I will say it is simply amazing to return to a place I have long loved. Over the years it has made its way into my dreamworld, morphed in fantastic ways night after night, until the real thing seemed hardly tangible. But here I sit, in a stone tower, overlooking a darkening Scottish sky that at 10:45PM still bares the faint tinges of a coral sunset.This morning the tide was out and the beach was littered with the translucent corpses of jellyfish amidst the long tendrils of seaweed, like a diadem set in a head of woman's hair.
A Day in the Life
Today was a meeting with the Kay from the Environmental Group, and Tim from the Seamill grounds, as well as dropping in on some friends and being lovingly spit up upon by a tiny baby. An anointing or sorts, to match all the other strange children's fluids that have come into contact with me in the past 72 hours. We had coffee ('decaf white') at a cafe in the village called the Cherry Orchard and stopped in at the local co-op for a few things. I managed to stay out of the bookstore, which was hard, and G, Hecho & Mum walked to the beach and then crashed in the afternoon. Oh! And few things can beat half a fresh crusty baguette filled with brie & tomatoes, eaten on a walk through a beech grove during an early Scottish afternoon when the rain has abated, the foliage sparkles with a thousand raindrops and two weeks of gardening lie before you.
Fecundity & Color
Purple loosestrife, Queen Anne's Lace, foxglove & buttercups. Ivy-leaved toadwort's sweet little faces and the pinky-red color of the sand along the Firth of Clyde. Huge specimens of wild fuchsia growing right along the burn, and the old wild roses & honeysuckle that have threaded their prickly way through enumerable shrubs & old fences. I spent some time with a huge bull thistle that was growing out of a crack on Glenbryde Road, with its glowing purple and silvery green  nodding down to the ground. The air is redolent with the odor of wet green and salt, lots of wood doves, crows and gulls.
This is God's trip, His fingerprints are all over this thing we're doing- the rest of the team arrive tomorrow, and we're diving in! Pray for us, leading this team, wrangling the children, getting our hands dirty in the sweet Scottish soil.....