Postcard from Home

I don't seem to be getting to write postcards to anyone on this trip, so this can be something of a substitute. I am starting the second half of my holiday, and I feel very relaxed and at home.
The first part of the trip, to Belgium for my brother's wedding, was quite full, involving a thirty-six hour day coming over from California, with the wedding, a party and a dinner the next day. The weather was quite grey and cool as well, with some rain; it is only on returning to England last Monday that the sun came out, and since then it has been the epitome of an English summer, with the sky blue and the trees green.
I have had several glimpses of the life I might have led if I hadn't taken the opportunity to go to San Francisco ten years ago; I hadn't seen my brother's new wife's family for more than ten years; her sister's children were now twenty-four and twenty-three, when I remember them as twelve and eleven. Back in England I met with a friend I have known for more than twenty years, and talked to him about his process of grief around losing his wife a year ago, at age fifty, and how he looks after their son, now about to leave school. With my mother, there was her fear of sickness, old age and death which she had not been able to express to other people much. Now I am in Cornwall, in deep quiet countryside, feeling very much at home.
I first really got those feelings walking with my friend, in fields and commons forty miles north of London, the abundant green, the large broadleaf trees, which seemed to nourish me, whether by triggering happy memories, or by some deeper cellular exchange. Now I am in the hills and valleys where my father's family has lived for around six hundred years, which has been the place I have felt most rooted since I first visited as a teenager, having grown up elsewhere. Yesterday I spent many hours fixing up my old bike, which suffered in a fire a couple of years ago, but it was completely worth it to go riding down narrow lanes this morning, between head-high hedgerows and trees that often create a vivid green tunnel to pass through. In weather such as we are having, there is nothing better.
There has been a lot of travelling and waiting for trains, which I have mostly enjoyed, by not being in a hurry, and watching everyone going about their business. And there has been the World Cup, which dominates here in a way I don't think Americans could understand, unless you combined the Olympics, the World Series and a Presidential Election into one event, particularly now we are about to play Germany. Reading the papers I scan for familiar and new cultural references, seeing how attitudes change over the years, how people are living and trying to be happy. I haven't sat any zazen as such, but I have had plenty of opportunities to be mindful and present. And now, I am going to watch the football...