Back On Tavistock Place

After a harrowing night of storm and wind, Maureen, Mike and I landed at Heathrow, hours later then expected. I sat in the back of the plane with a school of  young men, gangly tired bodies sprawling into the aisle, back from a skiing holiday in Vermont. I felt like their house mother, except when Mike, on his way back from his aisle walks, would bend down and kiss me on the forehead. Leaving Dawn and Linda was hard, so intimately had our lives intertwined during those five and a half weeks up on Columbus Avenue. The turn over happened quickly, Linda relinquishing her care of me over to another tall loved woman, Maureen, at the airport check in and rushing back out to save Dawn from the airport police. And then, without my being able to contact her, as we swam off the underground with our luggage on a train crowded with Chunnel train passengers, suitcases like children all around us--stunned from the sleepless night-- there was La Professoressa who had waited, train, after train, for us in bare faith in our arrival. You were on the 13th, she said triumphantly. Now all are sleeping and I am once again, back in the early London light, at our little table, pondering what was and planning for our next community, the lesbian and feminist women of Belgrade under the auspices of dear Lepa.