Reflections Back Home
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Sweet Home Seattle
By Jill
We touched down in cloudy, autumnal Seattle two days ago. Autumn was a bit of a shock to my system. I have been living in summer for the last four months, and I had convinced myself that Seattle's weather had arrested on that warm June day when I left it. Alas, the leaves are turning and there's a distinct chill in the air. And, nearly perpetual cloud cover has made me feel hopelessly out of place with my "I've spent four months in the sun" tan.
I continue to be torn in two directions, hankering both for "real life" in Seattle and to be back on the road again. Instead of hunting for wild places, I'm hunting for apartments. And, I've traded the worry of whether we should go snorkeling or bird watching for the worry about which cell phone plan to get.
Our last week in Mexico was amazing; we finally saw a Yucatan that isn't covered with hotels and tourists. In fact, we discovered paradise on a deserted beach. (At this time, we're not naming names. We're still undecided about whether we want to reveal our find to others or selfishly horde it for ourselves.)
All in all, life over the last four months has been good--very good. We've returned healthy and, hopefully, wiser. We've been tremendously blessed with eye-opening experiences that have helped us think about the world a little differently. Once we're settled in an apartment, we hope to post a collection of pictures from the trip as well as some of the writing we'll be doing over the next two months. So check back in a couple of weeks. And, many thanks for your interest in our travels.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
One month off the road
By Jill
Today marks our one-month anniversary of being home. Traveling, one month is an eternity of experience. It goes by quickly, but is filled with more amazing adventures than you can possible remember. At home, one month is a blink of an eye. It goes by quickly, and if you're lucky it's filled with one or two adventures worth remembering.
And so it is that we've passed our first month at home with just a handful of adventures instead of the lifetime's worth we were used to on the road: a new apartment, a couple of nice hikes, quiet moments with our sorely missed cat, a disastrous election. And so it is that we've hit the one month mark without adding pictures to the website (they're coming, I promise) and without sitting down together to capture memories and talk about what the trip meant to us.
After longing for "normal life," I'm now worried that normal life will swallow me whole, leaving behind my memories of the past four months. I’d forgotten how easily the mundane can distract you from the extraordinary.
Many people have asked us over the last month how it feels to be back in Seattle. The best word Eric and I could think of was "seamless." To be perfectly honest, it mostly feels like we'd never left. Certainly our life now doesn't look like it did before we left: it's fall instead of summer; we live in a different apartment and neighborhood; I'm not in school; and Eric spends his days writing rather than punching a clock. But life feels the same. It feels like we picked up exactly where we left off.
The problem is, I don't want our trip to feel like a temporary diversion, a hiccup in my continuing life in Seattle. So I'm challenging myself to find a way to fit the trip--its experiences and lessons--into normal life here at home.
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