Cheese (cake)

We made it back to Lusaka today in a marathon of 12 hours by cars and planes. Everything went smoothly-- we even managed to share a taxi from the airport with some very generous teachers from the American school who did the (half) marathon yesterday and paid most of the fare after helping us negotiate it down.

I had nearly forgotten it was Easter until the second plane ride, when the little box lunch/dinner came with cheesecake that I swear was made with my (late) Aunt Doris's recipe, which is the cheesecake my mom serves every Easter. It was the same bizarrely fluffy consistency, the same graham cracker crust. Honestly, I don't even really like it (and regular readers will be aware that I have a Bit of a Sweet Tooth; I don't turn down many desserts), but it made me nostalgic and sappy feeling all the same. It's possible my whole extended family was sitting down to a big Easter dinner at the moment I was eating my little plastic tub of cheesecake. Sniff.

We sat on an exit row, which ramps my crash paranoia into overdrive. On the plane I had a momentary image of our fiery demise, and my first thought was, well, then I don't have to go back to Zambia. It only lasted about a half a second before I realized it was an unacceptable line of thinking. Except for the bus ride back to Chipata, I'm actually kind of excited to get back: to move into our cute little house, to cook up all the delicious treats I bought in Cape Town (mint chocolate cupcakes! etc.), to make some new friends. 

But today I'm kinda homesick.