A whirlwind 3 weeks brough us back to South Africa

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A very blessed and beautiful day to all of you! I hope you are well. I've not been in a place or space to check in and respond or post for the last few weeks, much have happened. I've left the lands where the song of the blackbird was just announcing spring and came back to the noise of the hadada and the kwêvoël (go-away bird) in autumn. A whirlwind 3 weeks in which we gave up our lease, packed up a life, flew over Iran, the horn of Africa and the Zambezi river to end up in Johannesburg one morning at 4am. Reason - Family. Dalene's family specifically. One of her nephews has an ordination ceremony in Thailand so her brother asked us to come back, look after his restaurant and my mom in law as there was no one else who could do this. My other brother in law (the mentally ill one) who was supposedly doing the looking after my mother in law, went with, supposedly to look at options there to stay there. I do not understand these people. So here we are. There were some promises made before we left, which has already been broken. My darling beautiful wife has managed to stress herself right into a shingles attack. My mother in law is a wasted woman, she is thin, sickly and a shadow of the person we left in their care two years ago. I had two highlights the last three weeks - one was the fact that we actually had both water and electricity on Saturday night (first time since we got here a week ago) and so I did not have to boil water on the gas stove and wash out of a bucket in the dark after along day's work, and the other was the joy on my mother in law's face when she saw her clean bedding (more on that some other time), having a decent meal and tried on the new slippers we got for her last night. The whirlwind of change is calming down for now, but the nightmarish circumstances will remain until we can figure out a few things. Mostly because we are getting to grips with what is happening here. For now we are going to enjoy breakfast to the lovely piercing screams of the infernal hadada (the Sesotho believe the calls of this birds means rain is coming - they are mostly wrong. Today is dry, more dry and then some more dry). Hope your Monday gives you a song in your soul and not a screech in your ear