• There doesn’t appear to be anything weird on my dad’s kidneys. Hooray! Except it makes me nervous to actually celebrate this too much before the official doctor’s appointment on Monday, so let’s go with a very small and tentative: hooray?
• I found out I probably won’t need to quarantine upon returning to Italy after all, so I pushed back my flight by a few days so I can take my parents to that appointment on Monday. I’m not-so-secretly hoping that they’ll actually let me in to listen to the diagnosis, etc., so I can take notes. That’s a thing, right? The offspring serving as a sort of secretary for parents at a certain point in their lives? My parents are still quite spry and absolutely lucid, but still. I’d find it comforting and also feel it would maximize efficiency. We shall see.
• I am missing the partner and also feeling sad to be missing out on this theoretically lovely time of release from the school year and from the pandemic into a cheerier summertime, when we would also be happily moving into our new place… but it’ll come. Just another few days later. Have to take what comes sometimes, right?
• Speaking of having to take what comes, I got my period. It was two to three days late and my temperature was still up on all three of those mornings, so a little (medium) glimmer of hope had definitely started to form. I’d even mentioned it to my mom yesterday morning, just a few hours before it all turned out to be a false alarm. Sigh. Maybe next month?
• The cicadas are still out and I somehow find them very… comforting? Grounding? Reassuring? I don’t know, but for some reason I’m glad to hear them every morning when I make my way back up to the surface of consciousness. I think I will associate their bizarre sound (to me, they sound like several car alarms going off in the distance) with this also bizarre interlude… here in America at a time of year when I am usually not, getting my first glimpse of what the parent/child role reversal will look like… in limbo but hoping for good news for my dad, not ready to face the alternative.

Photo: A cute little chipmunk from my last walk. A cicada photo would obviously be more appropriate, but I don’t have one, and this little guy surveying the slightly gloomy, very humid, trying-to-be-summer landscape feels very apt.