reacquainting

Seventy-eight degrees today, warm and bright enough that at four in the afternoon you feel like it should be seven thirty or eight at night, that it should be early May, tilting back toward long days, shadows that stretch across fields and into woods. I can feel the distance of an ocean, the span of another continent. But it is good to be here, so many reasons it's worked out so well to postpone the trip back (which I will write about as soon as I'm allowed!). So no complaints, none of the tendency of my eyes and heart to trail toward the far-off. I might finally be learning to be where I'm at. So there's that.

And there's this weather. There are few things that so overwhelmingly feel familiar and good than walking outside barefoot in short sleeves. The other night, mid-January, I walked down the driveway to take out the trash, mild air, a city on the coast and decided right there to drive the seven minutes it takes to get to the ocean.

The sand was cold (a reminder: we are bookended by December and February) and it was darker than I remember it ever being. Lots of stars, but not enough of them or of clouds to light anything except the breakers. And let me tell you, they sounded so much closer than 100 meters away. So much bigger. I'd been afraid to go out to the water by myself because I could barely make out a trash can twenty feet away, so I sat on a bench and watched the sky, listened, and there it was, what I felt standing next to the Bay of Vlore one night in March, except multiplied by ten. Afraid of the bigness of something I couldn't see, afraid of something I've thrown myself in constantly since I was two or three, that I've swum in on better-lit nights.

I would have laid out there all night listening to it if I hadn't been alone. Eventually I walked out nearly to the water and realized, I'm not afraid. But I am exposed, I am the highest point for hundreds of feet, and in Romania everywhere I go there are buildings reaching up beside me, mountains growing upward. There's little conclusion here. I watched the sky a while longer, reorienting to being at a different point under it, thinking about how it had looked in Colombia, a warm, breezy night.

There's a newness to the Atlantic, or maybe a newness in me--I think of reading Into Thin Air, how the writer had to become reacquainted to his wife after two months and everything that happened on Everest. That hesitance and uncertainty in the newly changed. And I'm seeing it in other ways, seven weeks in: being unused to American twenty-something male-female dynamics. Feeling like I've got to make my sentences more polite when I speak to strangers, the you so direct. The music wherever you go--stores, in people's houses--way too loud. Maybe I'm just getting old.

But it's beautiful here and I'm grateful for it, for the ocean and walking outside barefoot, a feeling of freedom coming from, what? Knowing a place, its culture? It hasn't really changed, even if I have, and stepping back into things that have been true my whole life of this specific place, that comes easy. Ce ma bucur de asta, in the sense of being glad in, of rejoicing.

this is what's up

Also there's another one with our mother and it is so hysterical you will pee. She looks like a cartoon that is about to explode. We're not sure how it happened but we've been banned from ever publishing it.

Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to get on here to write something before then, but if not: merry Christmas, y'all!

being back, all the strange and good

Sitting back down to this, swung over here across a continent and ocean, I remember that it is Advent, that two years ago this time I was also waiting and wondering. Except I know the answer. "S-a nascut Mantuitorul, Domnul si Izbavitorul."

It's good being back. It smells the same--I'm adjusting already, but Sunday morning breathing in you could tell how close to the ocean we are, the air different altogether. The eggs are really strange, really rubbery besides being what look like unnatural colors. The milk is incredible, though. I have missed the milk.

And it's milder. Warm, even. Tomorrow morning we might get up and see the sunrise over the ocean, all bundled in hoodies because it's fifty degrees out. That's something American I've missed: hoodies. The idea of bundling in one, though, and listening to people say it's freezing at that temperature seems foreign now.

That's it, mostly. Settling back in has been quick and easy, picking up an old life. A lot of good things have come together, mostly in unexpected ways.

**

This has been sitting as a draft since last week. It was too cloudy to see the sun come up so today, ten days after I got here, eight since I've been in Wilmington, I drove down to the south end of Wrightsville. It's different altogether. The dunes on the left are all gone and the water looked much closer (although it may have just been high tide). I'd forgotten how much wind comes off the water, the constant sound of the whole body of it moving. You don't hear it when you always do, so I walked and listened, mostly, watched the finer sand blow across the beach. It was like watching fog roll in, only sped up. A different set of tides.

Meanwhile it's snowing in Romania. And I am breathing in salt air, the taste of the sound in the back of my throat. And warm enough to prance around without shoes and in short sleeves and chase the seagulls, wind and hair and just about anything else not tied down whipping around. I think even the way we talk was blowing around in it, a hopeful rocking swaying sound. A thing you can catch. Or that catches you. Maybe I just mean the whole thing's caught me.


I think that's enough for now. Last night I had my first group FD presentation. Only four more to go this week. If you're the praying type...

history and memory

Tomorrow I leave Pitesti and then Friday morning, before the sun even comes up, I will be on a plane headed west. All my life, in order to go home, I had to travel east, toward the ocean. Home was toward the sand and the pines, a place as far as you could go. I think of the line of the coast, growing up on the edge of a continent.

Tonight my dad put up pictures of the men in his family on facebook. That is an impossible sentence, one I never expected to write. My French family I never knew, a culture and a language I might have learned if I'd grown up with--this is how he refers to them--["my"] Pepe and Meme. There were eight kids, four boys and four girls. Now three of the four sons have died, both parents, and I don't know the first thing about three of the four daughters except that one has a daughter of her own living in Paris. And from the fourth sister I have a cousin, one I've never met but talk to on facebook, who looks more like me than anyone on my mom's side. And they live in the Bay Area, where my mom was born, a place for more and more reasons I'm feeling more and more connected to.

It feels like so many things are converging, lines overlapping until it becomes a solid thing. Imagine a city from space, the bright concentrated center, lights spider-webbing outward. Except the motion is inward. Not toward a place, exactly, but some shared, common thing. I can't articulate it yet--I don't understand. And there's more to it that I'm not writing, but I wonder, what's God doing with this?

Every time I sit down to write lately, it comes back to this. The idea of home, I mean. There's this, watching the bones of a history I first saw four years ago fill out. Watching it all connect to so many things that are true now, both new and old, seeing the way history and memory weave themselves into a thing with flesh. (Oooh!, but I don't think either of these are what puts the heart to beating--real, but not living?) And then there's the fine line between identifying and being identified by--I look at these pictures and we all seem to have the same eyes, the same hands even, and yet it is not in their image that I was made.

*

I left this off to talk to a friend and by now the thread is gone. So many thoughts, and all of it underscored by the uncertainty of what follows December. Thinking about this place, the homeless man to whom we gave a half-eaten kebab that no one could finish, then realizing what we were doing, spent the next few hours wishing we'd at the very least bought him a new one and had given him that. The woman today who discovered I wasn't Romanian because, she said, she noticed I thought before I spoke. And the way I thought about that on the walk home, how in English you would have said that I needed to think, not just that I thought. Besides the unintended social commentary it made me wonder if I might want to be marked by that, among other things. Being pensive, pausing, considering my words.

Anyway, these are the things I'm leaving with, these are the pictures of Pitesti that will stay with me the next few weeks. Coming back home richer in both the understanding of a history and fuller in the sense of what I remember about where, for now, I'm leaving. Thinking about ten hours above the ocean, rocketing between those two things, wondering what they'll make themselves into.

thinking of home and feeling hopeful

Two in the morning and I'm up because I'd had to stay up to skype with a friend and suddenly it seems I've caught my second wind. Tomorrow's a full day but it starts around noon and ends around eleven, so I've got the space to do this. Be awake with my thoughts, sit and pray or write without having to give up anything to do it. It's so easy to be thankful for this thinking back on being a full-time student and working two jobs plus doing a ton of InterVarsity stuff. It's also easy to feel guilty. But I think--I hope--I will sleep in tomorrow and wake up grateful for good gifts, for how differently life can shape itself in different spaces. Living in a part of the world with real calendar seasons has taught me that much.

So there's that. And talking with a friend from such a different part of my life, heading back in two weeks to Wilmington, heading home. But here feels that way too most days, and here's where I've surprised myself: while I'm more excited than I can say, it feels routine somehow. It's the wrong way to say it altogether. But you spend a month in Berlin, you head to Bucuresti once a month and by the end of it flying to another continent, even one you've been away from nearly two years, doesn't seem so big. Exciting, the sort where you count down the days, but not like the bigness of going to a new country.

I realize what I just did there. On the one hand, in two weeks time I may eat every last one of these words. We'll see. On the other, what if it is? Like going to a new place, a new country. Not so new there's nothing to recognize, but the small things. Some things strained by time and distance, other things worn smooth--you run your hand over it, turn it over, hold it up to the light. This is new and old, all at the same time, and no easy place to put it in your mind.

There's something about living fragmented--is that what it is? Is that the right word? That, despite the way the internet draws the pieces into mosaic, I can pause my life here to go back to my life there, the one that's been some ways paused (for me), and other ways moving forward, an image or feeling of all the weight of a train (for others from the perspective of one who isn't moving). But then that's not true either. I am moving, but it's stepping outside of this movement into what's been a fixed point and--

And I could get lost in this, could do this for the rest of the night. I'm thinking of home, of going back to it, of that word I can't quite pin down for all its changing shape. But I am hopeful for the newness of it. And glad that instead of having one place that is surely, fully home (while in all the rest I look back toward it), there are pieces of it here in Pitesti and back in Wilmington and that because it's so mutable I'm as likely to find it anywhere, my heart caught when I least suspected.

quote(s)-of-the-day

Just a handful floating around in my head from things I've been reading lately.

Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone):

"We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation."

"Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?"

"Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh, yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they'd have the same awareness of us that we had of them."

Dinesh D'Souza (Godforsaken):

"There is something a little off key about Western academics saying, 'I have lost my faith because of the suffering of the Rwandans,' while Rwandans are saying, 'Our faith draws us closer to the only one who can console and protect us, which is God.'"

David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle):

"Just when normal life felt almost possible--when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation."

Tash Aw (Map of the Invisible World):

"In those days he did not understand yet that Home was not necessarily where you were born, or even where you grew up, but something else entirely, something fragile that could exist anywhere in the world."

Miroslav Volf (Exclusion & Embrace):

"The account of creation as 'separating-and-binding' rather than simply 'separating' suggests that 'identity' includes connection, difference, heterogeneity. The human self is formed not through a simple rejection of the other--through a binary logic of opposition and negation--but through a complex process of 'taking in' and 'keeping out.' We are who we are not because we are separate from the others who are next to us, but because we are both separate and connected, both distinct and related; the boundaries that mark our identities are both barriers and bridges. I, Miroslav Volf, am who I am both because I am distinct from Judy Gundry-Volf, and because over the past 15 years I have been shaped by a relationship with her. Similarly, to be 'black' in the US means to be in a certain relationship--all too often an unpleasant relationship--to 'whites.' Identity is a result of the distinction from the other and the internalization of the relationship to the other; it arises out of the complex history of 'differentiation' in which both the self and the other take part by negotiating their identities in interaction with one another. Hence, as Paul Ricoeur has argued in Oneself as Another, 'the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other.'"

wholeness, home, palestine and a mess of questions

I spent a few days last week at a conference in the great land of Anglia, that blurry-edged place that makes me feel like I've mixed my English-speaking home with Middle Earth and the United Nations. It's true that it feels like a surrogate home in different ways, a step toward the one I'm an ocean away from and a step toward the one I was made for.

It was lovely and full and set my head doing circles around itself (as it is wont to do). I know I'm forever writing about the sky, but there's this: driving back around dusk, the sky a Chinese watercolor, I thought, this could be Wilmington. I know this place. And so I said something, only because I'm nostalgic, only because the lines constantly draw themselves to other places. (You see what you end up with? It's a tangled mess, but it's a mess in which you can have your heart stretched between places, on and between so many continents, and yet have it whole.)

The person I was riding with surprised me by saying that the sky there is actually different than it is over continental Europe. This is an Atlantic sky, he said. A wet sky.


I'm back in Pitesti now, the place where the sky was the first thing I loved, and for a while, the only thing. But this place is teaching me about willful love, about the decision of it. How many opportunities have I had to practice this in these last six years? How many more will there be? I think of Abram, of God pointing him toward the stars: "if you can count them." This is a loose idea, one I'm writing as I think, but there's the idea of that too being an inheritance.


My mind is wandering now, landing somewhere near a conversation I had a few hours ago with two students from Palestine. You come back to the question of home and place, of being pulled asunder. Could there be wholeness? I have a place I've grown from and another I'm growing toward, and meanwhile there are roots shooting outward, everywhere. But this, what they are saying, this is something altogether different. What if you believe there is a hope for both home and reconciliation, that in fact there is a great reconciler? That "if you can count them" is a promise fulfilled outside of yourself?

But living it--that is something else, isn't it? For me, the hope of a true home and a way to persist in love only come together. They come out of the words it is finished; I am reminded of them as I turn, surprised to see across Pitesti to the hills in the north, a teeming sky above Rasnov, tekhelet. But I wonder. These answers are easy--they are true, yes, but they're also easy. And living it, knowing it in the face of much harder things--it's something beyond having a right theology. And how on earth do I point people to it?

The thread is gone now, I think, all frayed out into more questions. And they keeping coming.

the circus: a balcony, the sky, -ward words & dinosaurs

Our proprietara has come from Canada and it's been nothing short of a circus these last days, people in and out of the apartment all the time, Doamna Flori staying to talk for hours--and by the way, she has a favorite word, one we hear every third sentence: dracu and all its various forms :)) For those who don't know, it's kind of like hell but a little more versatile. She's decided she wants the balcony to be properly enclosed (instead of having frosted windows we can't see out but that let all the heat/cold in), which is wonderful for us. When the first guys came to demolish everything to make way for the new, I got to see Romanian 'negotiating' and getting things done at its finest, including lots of Doamna Flori's favorite words and her brother-in-law yelling at the workers' boss on their phone.

I ended up leaving while they were working on things and by the time I got back it was done, everything above the waist completely gone. Because our apartment is south-facing and we get direct light from 11 am nearly until the sun goes down between 9:30 and 10, and it's been hot and cloudless all week, walking into that room felt like standing at the helm of the Dawn Treader. All that light, nothing but sky so it felt like sailing off the edge of the world.

It starts to cool down after 8 so I've been spending my evenings out here, a towel on dirty rough concrete and feet propped against the side of the balcony. And all that sky. I'm really under it--not looking up at a cut of it between buildings, but under enough of it that I can see how it curves, the clouds bending at the edges like a snow globe. And up here on the fifth floor you can listen better.

When I get back a week from now, none of it will be here. There will be a roof and lots of windows--good for looking outward but not also upward--I want to look outward and upward! To reach with all these -ward words, onward, inward and especially downward where I forget to look, where I find the man with one blue eye, the other cataract and milky, a sidewalk full of reasons for lifting my own eyes toward the sky, hope in the form of the son of a poor carpenter, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Hosanna, indeed. You see?

And so. When I return, it'll be enclosed, but especially nice in the winter, I think. Now, and then too, I am thankful for this sky, the cool quiet air as it settles into twilight, all the blocs in a blue-purple glow. That said, it's been less romantic at night. It's too hot to sleep any way but with the door wide open, and so now that the balcony has nothing above it, I'm convinced someone's gonna rappel from the roof and bust into my living/bedroom. But more than that--I'm just gonna say this, don't judge me:

I can't help but notice that I'm at the perfect height and the door's the perfect width for a t-rex to stick his head in. I keep dreaming about dinosaurs, which of course is hardly unusual, Jurassic Park being my favorite movie as a kid. I guess tonight, then, is the last chance for potentially being devoured.

And that sky, which is just about done with its business of transition now. Time for the stars, a different ship, suddenly an image from Amistad, the stars wheeling around a fixed point, Cinque looking for east, pointing homeward.

home

I bought my ticket back to the States last night--a round trip ticket, putting me in North Carolina for four weeks and St. Louis for another. I can't even begin to describe how excited I am to be going back, to smelling salt in the air and being with people I know, who know me. And Cheetos, ranch dressing and stuffed crust pizza.

Yesterday I was skyping with a guy who was on the team with us when we went to Romania that first time in 2009. He's on staff now too, in the States, and talking to him reminded me of something that happened in Brasov toward the end of the trip. We were eating lunch in the city center and the waitress who brought me my ice cream put a little American flag in it. And this guy yelled America! when he saw it and I got all awkward and annoyed and told him to hush, that people would know we were Americans. Of course they already did, big group speaking English and wearing tennis shoes. And I was all about being quiet, blending in, that sort of thing. And not that I'm not now, but in a way I never thought I'd be, I feel sort of like my friend shouting out because I am going home, and the US, North Carolina is surely that place.


(Note: this being immediately post hiking on the mountain for two weeks and rolling down a mountain in a minibus, not only was I super tired, super dark and super skinny, all I wanted for lunch was ice cream and soda so that's what I ordered. Sadly you can't see the little flag they gave me.)

The other day it occurred to me that Wilmington is the only place I've ever lived that I didn't get the urge to move on from after a certain amount of time. That's not exactly true, because there was a natural ending, a natural transition into something new. But it's been true of every other place I've lived. After a while I start to get restless and I'm ready for something new. Sometimes I hated the place I was living, sometimes I liked it; it usually didn't make a difference. But in Wilmington--while I still can't see myself going back and settling permanently there--it was home. Coming back to the pines, coming back to a place where there was and is true knowing--other people of you and you of other people.

Something else is true, too, though. I realize while thinking of going back home that if it's not true of this city, then it's true of Romania, that I love this country. This hasn't changed. I've got some big things to pray about this summer, the sort of decision with a clear want but not a clear should, no sure direction. What do I do? (It just occurred to me writing this that it probably sounds like I'm talking about whether or not to stay in Romania... nope, that's not it, not yet anyway.) Anyway, the question remains, one I'm sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting to my Father.

But there is this verse, this constant, steady truth: "But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you." (Psalm 39:7) It's a question, a challenging one, as much as a statement, one sending threads through everything else as I work through this theme of home. That word, that idea, but also something more tangible, more so even than a house or a city or a country.

pieces

My poor little neglected blog. It feels like it's been months since I've written anything more than filler. Life feels like all these little pieces and I've got them held in my hands but I'm not sure how they fit together. Is that true? I wonder even as I write it.

*

The other night, walking home from the sediu, someone passing me on the sidewalk grabbed my arm, holding it for less than a second, the way you'd escort someone. I can still feel his hand. He didn't stop--I turned to look at him, hands to my bag even before my mind made it around to the possibility of having been pick-pocketed. I thought, maybe I knew him, maybe he knew me, but it was too dark and neither of us stopped, just the quiet, a head full of questions.

*

In Albania, the sea. It's the first time I've seen any body of water bigger than the 'lake' at Herastrau in Bucuresti since I left the States thirteen months ago. I told the people I drove with that I'd probably cry when we got close enough to smell the salt in the air. I didn't, but standing next to the water, listening to sound of it moving, I was afraid for a few seconds. It's not even the sea there, it's a bay, the water lapping against the rocks like bathwater. But it sounded so big.

Growing up around the ocean you take for granted how powerful and vast it is. One of my earliest memories is being tossed inside a breaker when I was around three. I've swum in the ocean at night, stood at the edge of it and listened to a hurricane coming in. But standing there two weeks ago listening to the gentle sloshing, hearing that sound for the first time in over a year, I was reminded of just how mighty it is, how it could swallow me up in a second. I am grateful for this, for the things that help me understand the fear of the Lord.

*

Hymns, lately. Like this one. And an album called "Give Us Rest or (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys])" with songs like this, this and this. That last one, walking down the hill I live on, Spring in the sky and whispering in the air, I will come, I am coming. "Hosanna we are found!" Face turned up, blue swath of sky and the branches of a tree still waiting to bloom reaching upward anyway. We are found! And it is good. Thankful to be alive and singing it out.

*

There's a old man who begs outside of my bloc. His right eye is the faded blue something turns after being bleached by the sun. The left one has a cataract, milky white. I think about him a lot, wonder if I'll ever have the courage to sit down next to him and ask him about his life. Both his legs are amputated nearly at the hip, and once after giving him a leu or two, my roommate told me not to, that someone else was probably making him sit out there and beg and taking the money from him afterward. And then a few days later I saw an old lady wheeling him away across the street in a wheelchair. What's his name? I wonder. Does he have kids? Did he ever run with them in the front yard, in a park, toss them into the air? Or maybe he was an alcoholic. Maybe the old woman was his wife and they never had any. What would he say if someone listened to him--or would he say anything?

*

Two weeks ago I listened to someone playing the harmonica standing next to the Bay of Vlore. The sun was going down so it was too dark to see who it was, but it was someone from our group. Earlier that day I got asked what the desire of my life is, and then a week later in a stuffy hot room on a stuffy couch someone else asked me the same question. I think of that music, a harmonica bringing me back home, drinking tea in the cold and wandering among the people there, wondering about the answer. Praying for it, and hoping, too. Something I want so much, something God has been showing me pieces of these last thirteen months. It's so different than anything I ever saw growing up, really seeing it for the first time here. Good and hard and giving testimony to him in every bit of it.

But even if I only ever end up hoping, watching, in this moment there's this, seeing the pieces start to fit:

My cup, it can't contain all of your glory, your glory
Hosanna we are found after all you are
Holy, oh holy
Holy, holy, holy

fall in my sweet carolina

About this time, I'd be on a haybed being pulled behind a tractor, all the straight lines and clear carrying voices of fall in the rural South. We'd be at Mike's Farm--with Nicole, maybe, Alicia, a few others--and there'd be teenagers in hoodies laughing loudly, kids from local high schools dressed up to jump out and scare you as part of the ride. The sudden breath in the cold, a white half-gone shock of a breath, and then empty sky above the trees.

At Mike's Farm, when we were kids and went there on field trips, we made apple cider from apples we helped gather. That one time I nearly stepped on a snake. Hayrides, a haunted theme for Halloween and the Christmas light show all through December. That's what I remember--lights in the dark and cold air that cuts, that wakes you up from the inside, a whole throng of ten-year-olds with red noses.

It feels like fall now here. It is fall, but it feels like it too. I walk home from the sediu at night and if I closed my eyes, I could almost be there. It's different in the city, though. One thing I've appreciated since coming here from Bucuresti is that it's smaller, it's slower, there's more of an open feeling. But it's still not the country. It's not the hard frosted earth, it's sidewalk.

Fall is so much more of a physical season, I think. Surely you'll think of summer as being the most physical--you're outside, you're playing volleyball, you go to the beach, but the heat blurs things. Makes you hazy. You're there and you're not there, a sort of half-awake dream under the thick blanket of humidity. Spring wakes you back up, but it's a slow thawing and you start off numb, the coming-alive part the kind you look back and realize. But fall--those edged cold nights, close enough to summer to feel like reprieve, to wake you up from its sleep, and not cold enough to close yourself inside from it.

Something about being here: I miss being able to walk at night, to go outside and walk out my thoughts. You're outside, but there's a half-inside, constantly public feeling of it when you've got blocs rising up on both sides. I miss going down to the south end of Wrightsville and walking barefoot on the cold sand, hearing the whole expanse of the ocean rushing up to the shore, a sound you can see in the darkness. Space to think and pray. Even just space.

I keep coming back to this: leaning against a dune at night, burying my feet in the sand to keep warm, a whole stretch of the world we live on. A place you know and don't know, that's yours and utterly not yours, so much bigger than you. Room for thoughts and prayers and conversations to float up. Get stuck up there above you. Or how they blaze above you at the fair--you're all at the fair these days--red and yellow and music and shouting and the wheeling of the tilt-o-whirl, somebody eating a caramel apple or a fried Snickers bar.

Hard ground, the way hay feels under your feet, the way the air makes you want to jump and run and laugh loudly, alive.

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home.
--Ryan Adams

one foot back home

Last night it stormed something serious over Bucuresti. It's been hot like you wouldn't believe--not as hot as Wilmington, but nothing but asphalt and no ocean here, and also no fan so it's been about as bad. But then the wind kicked up and the funny thing about this city when it's about to storm is that the wind starts turning everything upside down and you see just how dirty it really is. I was sitting in my room which is just above the tops of some trees, level with the tops of others and all of a sudden they start tossing around and making a bunch of noise--a) you realize that you haven't heard anything that sounded so natural, meaning not like the guys working on the side of your block or the traffic in a while, and b) man that wind is serious! So I looked out and there on the street is this cloud of dirt kicked up and spinning around and generally obscuring the cars and ground-level stores. Twenty minutes of this, twenty minutes of watching low pulled-apart clouds race above the blocs, green-tinted everything and then cold rain. Reprieve, let me tell you. And you know what else? It smells different when it rains in the city. I don't know how I hadn't noticed yet. It's not a pretty smell, not a clean smell but I stood half hanging out the window anyway, cold wind and lightning. Not a bad way to end a day.

My computer is working now. Turns out it needed to be vacuumed (my taking it apart and attempting to clean it was along the right way of thinking, just didn't do it well enough) which is mostly embarrassing but also, hey, free. Holler. And my language is working again too. Two weeks of not using it and then jumping back in made for a kind of shaky start, but it seems to have done some restructuring while I wasn't using it and it's been a good time jumping back in. This language--I say stupid stuff all the time and have a long way to go, but I think I speak it now :)

If I can follow this bunny trail for a minute or two longer, some interesting observations for the fellow language-learner: one, I keep doing this weird thing where I forget I don't speak Romanian the way I do English (meaning well--hah, okay, seriously though, I mean without effort, without lag time between brain and mouth). You get to a point where you just understand what people are saying and you're not really thinking, oh this is Romanian or this is English, you just understand it. And so when you open your mouth to respond and all of a sudden it's halting and slow-ish and the fluidity of the conversation suddenly derails, you go, oh crap! I forgot! Has this happened to you?

Anyway, to return to things working again. The computer, the language. Even camp. In terms of knowing people deeply, this place for me is still a work in progress. But you spend a week or so with Americans (who are really American, versus the Romanianized ones I hang out with here) and it comes with all sorts of realizations. One: you and they have changed. This is not a bad thing. It's not really anything, in all honesty. It's just what it is. But two, you realize that no matter this change, there is still a place of rest and reprieve in being able to speak easily, to watch Doctor Who or whatever really, to slip back into the old for a while and feel it against your skin like an old t-shirt. Maybe it doesn't fit the same way any longer, but it's still a piece of home. And it is good. I am thankful. So it was to spend a week with friends. We could have been on Mars and it wouldn't have mattered.

And here I find myself back. I almost missed the plane back to Bucuresti, the one time in history a Romanian flight left early, and running onto the bus that took us to our plane, falling back into 'aoleu...' and a little Romanian lady next to me who told me how hot it was going to be when we landed, I felt like I was going home. It was indeed hot. And the taxi drivers hounded me. People kissed each other on both cheeks and drove like maniacs.

I think there are two homes in question here. One of people, one of place. The one of people is wherever they are. If I meet my friends in Germany, it is there with them. If my best friend flies from Wilmington to here, here we are home together. And wherever in the world I'm with my brother, there it is. But then place: I realize this now, looking back on seeing that Romanian van in Germany, in flying back on a plane I wasn't sure was going to land in one piece. The chaos of it all is familiar. The heat and the mic.ro stores and the parks, the look and sound of Romanians. It's a different slipping back in, one that comes with less of the comfort of people-home, but more of something tangible and constant, like a steadied arm.

And speaking of home: