A nossa viagem aos Acores

Friday night--that's two nights away!--we're getting on a plane. A plane is an amazing thing; it whisks you off the frigid, below-zero New England ground and, four hours later, deposits you in a tropical climate an average of 5 degrees cooler than Hawaii, the only place on this whole planet where pineapples--other than isolated specimens in botanical gardens--grow in greenhouses.

We'll land in a place where Portuguese is spoken, where tea grows, where spas spring up around natural hot springs. We'll see the ancient villages where my great-grandparents (grande-avos, I think) were born and baptized; in fact, my great-grandfather lived there until he was 18.


We'll walk around Sao Miguel (Saint Michael), the "Green Island", taking in the city of Ponta Delgada and the green countryside surrounded by blue, blue water.

It's hard to believe right now, hard to wrap my head around these facts of the near future, as I'm still engulfed in piles of work and petty stressors and frozen sky.