longing for home!!!

yesterday when i arrived at the bus stop in san jose that would take me back to san joaquin i noticed a san carlos bus sitting across the street. that's the bus that would take me back home.

my heart swelled with a longing for home, it was such a physical yearning, before it registered in my brain.

i wondered what it meant. it was not a longing for canada. it was for costa rica.

i miss the boys but i was lonely there even with 8 or 9 people around all the time. i spent a lot of time in my room reading while mimi spent the evenings in her room with her husband and the boys played play station 2.

we have been infested with chicken mites that had been driving me crazy with scratching. i don't miss that at all. we made a vegetable garden but nobody ever did any work in it and in a very short period of time it was grown over and i was told it was easier to buy the food in the store than to do the gardening.

i don't miss the humungous spiders, the rats, the ants, cockroaches or snakes in the house. the rain in the house, the bug nets, the mosquitoes, the red clay that is almost impossible to get out of your clothes, the garbage, the smells, the 38 degree temperature. i miss the hugs, the kisses, the enthusiasm when they get home from school, going to their soccer games, watching soccer games with them, cooking and cleaning for them. i miss them.

the weird thing is that i didn't really feel that the longing was to go home either. i miss them terribly and will return home next week. but i wonder if that is where i'm supposed to be.

i was talking to God and wondering about the intense longing to go home but not being sure where that was when i realized what date it was. october 2nd. one year exactly to the day that i arrived in santa rosa and had this feeling of coming home, it was like a cloud that descended on me and enveloped me, yet i was in a place i'd never been before, and when i was thanking God He said 'but only for one year' it would have been exactly one year yesterday except that i returned to canada april 8 and didn't come back to costa rica until may 13th.

i woke up again at 4.00 this am wondering about it. what this longing is for? is there something or someone in santa rosa i should do or see?

november 7 will be 365 days here. i have a ticket to return to canada 12/29th. will i change it? will i need it? will i use it?