Becquerel's Plate Volume Three

Perturbations, the third volume in my autobiographical series, described our emotions on having to leave Tucson in 1970, when Ken's teaching job at the University of Arizona required him to get a PhD elsewhere to continue teaching at UA. When we married in Tucson in 1966, we also 'married the desert.' It was new to us, overwhelming, and we embraced it as a major part of our life together. So even though we had to leave, we swore to return and make a life there.
It took us triple the time expected (Becquerel's Plate I and II tell that story), but in the spring of 1985, we were finally able to 'go home.' We had prepared in every way we knew how - education, work experience, personal connections. We set out on our homeward journey in an optimistic, confident, celebratory mood - we were sure our efforts would be rewarded.
But it was not to happen. We had no way of knowing, from the distance of almost two decades and hundreds of miles, that we would arrive in Tucson already branded with our past - reaching back not only to our time there before, but also the choices we had made in between, with unexpected negative consequences.
Yet despite disappointments, we managed to accomplish many things during those six years that we are still proud of, which helped us move forward to new horizons.
In Dickens's words, the time we called 'Tucson Two' was for us in many ways the 'best of times and the worst of times.' The memories are living and vivid - we still remember the good and bad, as though they happened yesterday.
Sometimes it seemed the troubles threatened our very marriage. Our passion for the paths we were separately pursuing strained the links between us, though the links eventually proved stronger, and they held. Six years, and we were off (in Milton's words) to "fresh woods and pastures new."