Orange makes me go blue...

As I was driving home tonight, I stopped my mind from running long enough to realize the world had taken on that beautiful warm, orange-yellow glow that I love so much—that I loved so much in Sudan, especially.

That glow just makes me want to take pictures.

Or, in this case, it made me want to close my eyes.

Strange reaction to beauty, I realize. And not altogether wise when you’re behind the wheel, either.

But that’s what I find myself doing more and more lately, just stopping and closing my eyes. I try to put myself back in Lopit, just like I did that first night I came home—trying to see the landscape stretch out from the foot of the mountain, trying to hear the kids yammering in Lopit, even trying to smell the smoke or that sharp, gag-inducing yeasty smell when they were making beer. I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to get so busy that all those memories, that love toward my neighbors and the kids, spill out as my head is overflowing with to-do lists and jostled around by my McDonalds pace.

This is how it comes—like deep waves of emotion and thought that hit hard but make a speedy retreat back to somewhere just below my conscience. I can’t tell if that’s an unhealthy defense mechanism—how I’m dealing with mourning the end of that part of my life—or if it’s God giving me a peace in the leaving by sparing me moment-by-moment heartache. But, then again, perhaps moment-by-moment heartache is something that could only happen in a vacuum. Or in a Hallmark movie.

(Yeah, I guess in my spare time I like to psycho-analyze myself unnecessarily…)

Either way, the orange tinge over Oglesby this evening hit like a breaker. The other day it was the memory of Laundina calling me by my English name, Andi (“the name my mother calls me,” as we explained it), and how special that was in my ears, since most everyone only knew me as “Ifeja” or some strange, botched pronunciation of “Andrea” (still always followed by “Ifeja”). That wave cracked me straight in the chest and made me miss her terribly.

And then of course there’s Ellen. The little monster might as well be a surfer on those waves, she so frequently brings them.