Another world.


I felt a little insulted when my old neighbor, having returned to the U.S., wrote to say that Clare Hall felt like another era. And yet, not even two weeks after having left, I find that I might feel the same way. Even my pictures look strange to me now--as if only a distant dream of water.

Tiny plenitudes.


These crabapple trees in front of the library are profuse with little fruit. I have continued, for one more day, trying my best to show up for the work I need to finish. I have not been entirely unsuccessful, but I have also not finished quite as much as I'd have liked. Such is generally my way. But the needful things get done--do get done, have gotten done, will get done.

Losing focus.


Oh, it's no joke. This morning, on my way to an early meeting, I stopped to take pictures of last night's raindrops, still hanging on a tree near where I used to live. After a few shots, my auto-focus seemed to stop working. Fortunately, it turns out that my camera is fine; it's the lens that's unresponsive. And I can still use it. I just have to focus it myself, which means that I have to rely on my own vision, which isn't the best out there, frankly.

Tomorrow, I stay in the house all morning. This breaking stint has to stop.

Back to life.


The resurrection lilies are out again, just in time.

People keep asking me how my culture shock is. I keep trying to explain that it's not quite culture shock, per se, but something more like life shock. Now that I'm back in my own home, with my own things, I'm having to remember what it's like to have all this stuff. The books are the greatest joy: who knew that I had this great a library? I'd gotten so used to not having it that I'd forgotten what's here. Now I fight the urge to go book-shopping from my own shelves, to select a couple of volumes and carry them into the next room and curl up--because what I'm still doing, have been doing since mid-July, is reworking that article that I began back in February, as an experiment. And getting down to it, since I've been home, has been more difficult than I'd been able to admit to myself that it might be. Today, at last, I remembered the remedy for a piece that seems to have lost its structure: outline it in reverse. See what kind of structure you've already made. Then change that structure and/or make it stronger and more visible, depending on what's necessary at any given moment. A few hours of this kind of work this afternoon made the current piece feel possible again.

Partly in celebration, I took a walk around the village (and down one hill away from the village, and back up again) this evening, just to see how things are as we lull here in this last calm before students start returning en masse. It was as quiet out there as these lilies were light.

Mechanical failures.


I'm starting to feel apprehensive about even touching mechanical things that did not make the trip to England with me: first there was yesterday's flat tire; now the modem seems to have decided not to work; and this afternoon my electric tea kettle smouldered out, leaving a scorch mark on my countertop. When it looked as though the mobile phone wasn't going to work, either, things felt just plain silly, as though the machines were somehow conspiring against me. Fortunately, the mobile phone issue was a matter of operator error. The tea kettle, on the other hand...was perhaps an intervention designed to keep me from drinking leached carcinogens mixed in with my morning coffee.

Of course I thought re-entry would be simpler.

Fortunately I have excellent light in the morning and the evening.

Full heart.

Today, I learned what it looks like when one's tire goes flat while one is washing the car. And then I learned (by watching the dear friend who came to my rescue) how to change a flat.

This is to say that some parts of the day were not really so good.

But then


I learned, once again, what a deep joy it is to have this face squinch into a toothy smile when I walk into a room. After months of Skyping, I wasn't really sure how she would respond to seeing me in the flesh every day. So far, so good: today we had lessons in eating blueberries, riding the adult-sized Sit 'n Spin in tandem, using the mailbox on a play house, doing downward-facing dog together, and allowing one's parents quiet time for unpacking the wardrobe boxes. I continue to harbor hopes that I will somehow be able to help teach her to be restful, even as I re-learn that myself, in this new old place.

Fourteen days to go.


In two weeks, I will have met my new advisees, and the new school year will be fully in swing. Time goes fast when you spend most of your summer away from home.

This evening I discovered that only one of my checked bags was opened on the way home. Which one? The one full of books and underwear, of course. When I started to unpack it, I couldn't see that anything had been moved at all. My guess is that the security people immediately knew that I didn't have what they were looking for.

Just one more.


A lot of stuff makes a big carapace for this life. I spend the day standing on desks and chairs, ripping open cardboard boxes, shelving books that have been in storage, rediscovering things I'd forgotten I had. That other country, the one where I lived for the year? It becomes so very foreign a place.

[Blackout day #1.]

My day, sunup to sundown:



When the pilot of our already much-delayed Columbus-bound Embraer 175 came on the p.a. to tell us we were number 18 in line for take-off, and that said take-off would happen in about 25 minutes, we all waited for the punchline. But that was the punchline.

It was a 24.5 hour trip, door to door, and everything went absolutely as well as could have been expected--coach breakdown on the M25, excess baggage charge, and kicking-over-of-first-20-oz.-coffee-in-my-own-country notwithstanding. Kicking the coffee over was no good--but remembering that I'd only paid $1.50 for it and being able to replace it with coffee and a Boston Cream donut for only $2.39 at Dunkin' Donuts were, to put it plainly, nothing short of awesome. ("Coffee and a donut for £1.20? Incroyable!") There at Philadelphia's gate B2, I had a little welcome-home party for myself. You probably would have laughed to see me love that custard the way I did.

Sadly, not only in Cambridge.


In the middle of a day so rainy and drear that it nearly made me rethink my ambivalence about returning home, I climbed to the top of a Park & Ride bus and headed to the next town south of Cambridge to visit a friend and her small daughter. Two boys, probably ten or eleven years old, followed me up the steps. Perhaps there's some adult protocol about letting kids sit in the front seats of the top of the bus, in order to get the best version of the illusion that you're about to crash into walls and oncoming traffic and pedestrians, but if there is, I disregard it. So, while I claimed the far right of the front row of seats, the two boys claimed the left two seats.

One boy was from the U.S., the other from the U.K.

Conversation snippet #1:
UK: America makes things up to prove you're right
US: No, we have more nukes, and that makes us right, so you'd better listen to us.
UK: That's not fair. That's bullying. That's blackmail. ... Anyway, no one's ever actually seen these nukes, have they. You're just making them up.

Conversation snippet #2:
US: I live near Camden, Pennsylvania, where like five people a day get killed.
UK: Yeah, what's up with that?
US: America is a terrible place.
UK: See! You just said America's a terrible place!
US: But we do a lot of things right.
UK: Name one.
US: We've got more nukes.
UK: But how do we know nukes even exist?
US: We used them.
UK: Right. You got lucky one time.
US: No, there were two.
UK: Right. You got lucky twice.

US Boy proceeded to deliver to UK Boy a lecture about history and current affairs--ranging from the reasons the U.S. used the atomic bomb, to the idea that what's really wrong with the world is that Mexican families are too big. To his credit, UK Boy said, "So you're blaming China's huge population on Mexicans?" UK Boy also rejoindered, later, by explaining that America is only what it is because English people came and colonized. "If it weren't for us," he said, "you'd all still be living in tribes."

That one slowed US Boy down, but not for long.

I found myself repeatedly on the brink of breaking in to correct these two young militarists, but I confess that I was dumbfounded enough not to know how or where to begin--especially since I also kept imagining how my friends-who-are-parents would feel if a stranger began berating their children, even in a constructive and non-belligerent way. Overall, no one came off well in this scenario: not them, in their cheery ignorance; not me, in my angered silence.

Tonight, my friends, I'd just like to say: Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

In 48 hours, if all goes well, my luggage and I will be on board a just-departed connecting flight back to my home state.

Tonight we had the weirdest sky I've seen in an age. I slipped out to the side street, in the rain, to get you a picture.

Only in Cambridge.


No, for real.

Tonight, I'm sitting down for the second half of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival's production of The Winter's Tale, and suddenly I realize that Stephen Hawking is in the audience.

And, while I'm being epigrammatic, can I just say that this innovation strikes me as very strange indeed--and yet so unsurprising, really. They've even gone so far as to suggest situations in which you might use it.

Sweet pea.


Today I learned that the name "Matilda" means "one who is fierce in battle." I like to believe that this newest small girl of my (near) acquaintance will indeed find herself able to be fierce when she wants and needs to be, and that she will triumph in all her battles.

Continuous growth.


This time last year, I was beginning to figure out that I was really coming here; now, I'm figuring out that I'm really leaving. Strangely, the autumn Boden catalog is playing a role once again: my Wisconsinian's friend's copy came in the post yesterday, and over our breakfast coffee, we played about with imagining how we'll clothe our lives once we return to the U.S. "You've changed," everyone here says. "Your life is going to be different when you go back." I find myself wondering whether they're right. When they're not here, I walk back into the fields and find my favorite shots again: there is the dusk, there is the nonsensically overgrown weed, there are the fringey grasses. But there are also the library tower, the tips of King's College Chapel, the hills in the distance, the deep green pastures. The scurrying bunnies. The squawking pheasant. The things that distinguish this landscape from that one, mark this one a second home, mark that one with absences I know I will feel for at least a little while, even amidst the glee of homecoming.

Another new person for the world.


Look, if Philippe Petit could take that walk, and if James Marsh could make that film about it, and (very best of all) if my friend could, with fourteen hours of work, bring a truly beautiful and healthy new little woman into the world, then there's hope.

Fittingly, we were gifted a pretty great sunset tonight. "Did you pack your cameras away?" my Wisconsinian friend asked me. "Nope," I said. "I've got one right here."

Closed door, opened window.

The cleaners weren't supposed to arrive at my flat until 10 a.m., but there they were, outside my open door, at 9:45. That last 15 minutes was going to be crucial, and they had come early. I did my best to scurry everything out the door and across the courtyard as quickly as I could, but what their earliness meant was that I hadn't had time to sweep the dust from the bathroom counter, or to wipe out the tub after my shower, or to drag the chest of drawers back out of the hallway where I stashed it a year ago to make myself a dressing area. "Stop worrying about it," said the across-the-courtyard acquaintance who threw open her flat's door and made today possible for me. "Cleaning flats is their job. For what we pay in rent, no one should be complaining if we don't do everything perfectly."

The worst part of getting chased out of the flat was that I barely had time to bid farewell to the space that has sheltered me so well for nearly a year, a space which has generated stories for me that I'll be telling for years.

Like my newest one, titled "How My Underwear Escaped Me." (I'm also toying with "How I Lost My Pants," but only for the UK release.)

It goes like this.

Last night, about an hour after Wednesday's usual formal dinner, I had finally worked myself up to the point of putting everything in the suitcases. It was clearly a physically impossible task: I had more things than would fit in the two cases allotted for the job. But I was determined to try, and I went about it the way I know how: shoes first, everything else later. I stuff underwear into the toes of my shoes, in order to help them keep their shape. This is how I do things.

Only last night, when I went to get my underwear and roll it up to put it in my shoes, I found that it had disappeared--all but the six or so pairs I'd pulled out so that I'd be in clean pants until I leave next week.

What the hell?

I combed through all the piles of clothes on my bed--I'd emptied my drawers before dinner, you see--but no underwear. I checked in the chest of drawers again, but there were no drawers in there, either.

I sent an e-mail to others who have recently left this place, in the hopes that maybe one of them would at the very least get a laugh out of the contortions one can get into while trying to leave a sabbatical abroad--and might perhaps even cough up a good suggestion for relocating my less-than-sexy knickers.

Just when I was actually starting to panic--because the disappearance of panties is no laughing matter, and I was having trouble remembering whether this would qualify as some nerdy "panty raid" (I know, let's go to the institute for advanced study and steal the cotton underwear of an English professor!)--I remembered what I'd done with all those other pairs.

I'd folded them neatly and used them to pad the bottom of the extra carry-on in which I'm taking home some of my burgeoned library from this year. That's right: my underwear's doing double duty. Some of it protects me; some of it protects the books that are like a great, big, heavy, paper extension of me.

"How are you going to get your things through the airport?" my beloved Lexingtonian has asked. The only answer I can come up with sounds as though I'm trying to be a smartass, but I'm really not. Very carefully, is all I can say. I'm giving up all pretense that I'm anything like mobile on this move. I'm just not. I'll be looking for trolleys, and porters, and help of any kind at pretty much every stage of the trip.

As for tonight's title: I've moved into the other part of my college and am sojourning in a friend's flat until I leave here. It's like another world--a weird hotel version of the world in which I've been living. This building is a good thirty years younger than the building where I've been living (which is the college's original building of flats, whereas this one might be its newest). And one wretched thing about this place, compared to my previous one, is that its space is so subdivided by its various rooms that it's impossible to get any air flowing--a feature compounded by the fact that all of the windows are equipped with locks that keep them from being opened more than a couple of inches. I'm all for safety measures, and I recognize that lots of families use big flats like this one when they stay in the college. But since I am not at risk of falling out the window, I'm no fan of these locks. So, after I schlepped and schlepped and schlepped, I did what my friend and I did for his flat, back in September: I removed half of the security lock so that I can get some air into this little room before it's time for me to sleep.

Because I need some sleep, and I'm going to need it soon.

No pictures today: though I did take some time and go walking through town (at the near-insistence of the neighbor who gave my stuff shelter all day), I didn't bother to unpack either of my cameras and take them along. Tomorrow, I will re-venture--in part to see how different Cambridge will look to me now that I am not so securely and happily perched as I have been for eleven months. I'm not so much farther from the center of town now than before--no more than five or ten minutes' extra walk--but it feels like I've left my universe. Since I'm a little further west now than I was before, I suppose that that feeling might be appropriate: it's not quite a halfway house, but it's taken me one half-mile further from one place that I love and closer to another.