Just a quick note: I’m on a sum­mer sched­ule now, so I’ll be post­ing only once a week until September…

Mother’s Day gift 2009: Alex Mon­roe, 22k gold plate-over-sterling sil­ver drag­on­fly pen­dant neck­lace set with a tiny Tsavorite.

Grate­ful is a state of being, and I’m in it. Our eldest son, Josh, just returned from a sojourn to Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto). It was a two-week excur­sion taken upon the com­ple­tion of his sec­ond year of col­lege; he left the Fri­day after his last exam.

Not all was well at the begin­ning of his trip — he was on a flight from Detroit to Tokyo where there were four con­firmed cases of the H1N1 virus aboard. Almost imme­di­ately upon his arrival he and his trav­el­ing buddy were quar­an­tined in their youth hos­tel. When the next morn­ing rolled around, a cou­ple of medics arrived to take their body tem­per­a­ture. Josh’s was 99.5. Now through all the years I’ve been a mom, 99.5 was never a fever in our house­hold, unless there were accom­pa­ny­ing symp­toms. How­ever, the Japan­ese hold to a more strin­gent stan­dard. Sud­denly, a med­ical crew, speak­ing lit­tle or no Eng­lish, appeared wear­ing Haz­mat suits, hel­mets, and masks. They buck­led Josh down on a gur­ney, placed him inside a bubble-lined ambu­lance, turned on the siren, and headed off to the near­est low-pressure hos­pi­tal room. Once he was admit­ted, Josh had no human con­tact, save for the occa­sional doc­tor visit (again, suited up, gloved and masked). Even his meals were deliv­ered through a ster­il­ized port in the wall.

The world sim card he bought for the occa­sion didn’t work in Japan (a word of advice for any­one trav­el­ing there: rent a cell phone), and so he skyped us just before they took off with him in the ambu­lance. Unfor­tu­nately, we lost our con­nec­tion mid­way through our con­ver­sa­tion. That was the last we heard from him for two days. After that we could only get word about his tests and his con­di­tion through the U.S. Embassy, and his friend who skyped us every three or four hours (Josh could make local calls but was not per­mit­ted to reverse the charges home to us. There was no expla­na­tion as to why…).

The Embassy finally called us very late Sun­day night with the good news that the hos­pi­tal would release him in a cou­ple of hours. On Mon­day morn­ing at 1:30 a.m. we heard the phone ring. It was Josh. He was fine, all the tests came back neg­a­tive, and after pay­ing the $650 hos­pi­tal bill (yes, he had to pay the bill), he was per­mit­ted to leave. Happy and healthy, Josh then con­tin­ued on his way to tour Japan.

Oh, and I for­got one lit­tle detail: this was Mother’s Day week­end. I think I earned my stripes…don’t you?

And so this neck­lace, hand selected in Japan by our son, and pre­sented on behalf of him­self and his younger broth­ers, is my Mother’s Day gift 2009. I later dis­cov­ered that some Native Amer­i­can cul­tures believe a drag­on­fly rep­re­sents renewal after great hard­ship. The Japan­ese take the view that it sym­bol­izes courage, strength, and hap­pi­ness. Believe me, Josh had absolutely no knowl­edge of the cul­tural sig­nif­i­cance of a drag­on­fly when he pur­chased the neck­lace; he thought it matched a pin he mis­tak­enly believed I owned. This is of no import. I haven’t taken the pen­dant off since his return. I do find the metaphors mean­ing­ful, how­ever this orna­ment will always be spe­cial and mostly for a sin­gle rea­son: my son returned safely home to give it to me.