"it's not that we're scared. . . it's just that it's delicate"

Well. . . my family is on their way home. I'd say, "I'm glad they came up," but that really wouldn't be quite enough. When I saw them last, at home, I was still very much in culture shock/jetlag mode, and to get to hang with them here, where I'm beginning to feel adjusted and at home, was pretty great. But I suppose they've got things like jobs an' all that in Alabama.

These past couple of days. . . they've been good. I need a word about a hundred times as strong as "good," but good will do for now. It's like I woke up with the sun on my face. Do you know? You lay down for a nap in a dark room, and when you wake up there's a pleasant warmth all over, and the sun is a flash of pure delight when you open your eyes.

I feel open in a way I haven't since. . . well, since Italy. I guess I didn't realize that I had closed up so forcefully over the weeks and weeks of travel to get back here to Pennsylvania. Do you know what I mean when I say 'open' and 'closed'? Open is like. . . happy, yes, but also a deeper kind of contentment. . . awareness of everything, noticing everything, everything providing fodder for my own work. Capable. Unafraid. Sort of? That's my best attempt to explain it. Like sleeping in the sun, it's kind of an inadequate metaphor. But I figure, I always explain to you my frustration and stress and everything else, so I will try to explain to you my happiness too.

I feel that this is home after all. I'm not forgetting Italy I guess - I mean, I still miss it, sometimes with a sudden lurching moment of homesick vertigo - but I'm OK with living here. I'm getting a sense of how I can work this, how I can make it good here, sliding Italy into the dictated American patterns. Probably no one would recognize the new patterns of my life as Italy except the people that were on the program with me, but I'm beginning to be OK with that too. I'm learning to forgive people for expecting me to be exactly the same as when I left.

Forgive is maybe a strong word. But it's kind of along those lines. And so I hope that everyone else can forgive me for expecting them to be the same as before, if I ever project those sort of expectations to you.

[I can't stop thinking about one particular garden and one particular vein of conversation. And above the trees dropping their acorns with a rush into the bushes, the stars high and faint. The warm mulch hushing the flowers content.]