I've uploaded my photos from Mexico! Some turned out nicely, though as usual I'm unhappy with how few I took - I took many more than what I posted here, of course, but I'm referring more to content. I have next to nothing that captures the colorful city of Merida, or the rural Mayan villages where people still live in houses made of thatch and wood. Evrything is open to the air, and washed with pink, or white, or turquoise. Butchers and food vendors have carts on the street selling panuchos or chili-covered mango...One of my priorities for the next few years is to get a good camera with a telephoto lens, largely to be able to capture people discretely from afar.

( Ria Celestun & Chichen Itza... )

In short - I loved Mexico, and I can't wait to go back as soon as possible. I couldn't help but feel that I was in a land of wild,  ancient gods quite different from my own (even before I went to Chichen Itza). It's a wonderful place with so much light and color, incredible food, generous and warm people, and a fascinating history. Merida is fantastic, and I'd definitely recommend it over the more touristy Cancun.

getting on a plane
ninety-four in Mexico
i'll wear my flip-flops

My undergraduate advisor recently joined Facebook, and I was very happy to borrow a series of photos from my summer on Great Duck Island in the Gulf of Maine. GDI was the fourth island I've lived on, and probably the most exciting; it's got an active lighthouse, and is home to several species of breeding seabirds. I spent ten weeks there for an internship without running water and with minimal electricity provided by solar panels and a generator. It was one of those experiences you really can't describe to people, but photos definitely help:

I'm at Penn State for the American Quaternary Association Biennial Meeting, which starts tomorrow. The drive was rather long and a bit grueling in the rain (we left at 8:30am and got in at about 11:30pm), and the last week has been rather intense (a terrible migraine, a wonderful birthday party for brdgt, a new vegetable garden, a twelve-hour day at school on Monday that involved multiple explosions of potassium hydroxide)...but I got to eat dinner with Herb Wright tonight, so I'm happy.

I'm sorry I'm behind on comments, and posting photos, and updating. I've been reading your posts and thinking about you all! My poster goes up tomorrow, and will be up for the next two days, so I'd better get a good night's sleep. Sweet dreams and a carefree rest to you all!

Just a quick note - I'm still in San Jose, having a lovely (though sleepy) time, and I miss you all. My poster is hanging up in the giant exhibit hall, and I've got a nice spot. People are possibly even looking at it as we speak! The "poster pub" session is from 5-6:30, which is when I have to stand by it and hope lots of people look at it. I'm up for two poster awards, too, so wish me luck! I fly out at 7am tomorrow morning (ugh), which will put me in Madison at a reasonable hour in the afternoon. Squee!

A few photos rescued from my digital:




The last photo taken before it went over the side! The person facing us is Steve Jackson from U Wyoming. I was waiting to get off the canoe from a bathroom break when I snapped this shot. On the platform, the guy squatting is my advisor, the guy in blue trunks is Jeremiah (one of my undergrads), and the third gentleman is Mike, one of Steve's grad students from UWyo.



Cave of the Mounds, just west of Madison. It was pretty cavey.



Another shot. It was a beautiful 50 degrees in the cave, and much warmer outside.



Limestone deposits forming on new stalagmites.

(+) Honey oatmeal bread, crunchy peanut butter, Trader Joe's ginger spread, and farmer's market strawberry peach jam. Oh, yes.

(+) Glorious weather. Perfect, clear, blue skies, trees bending under the weight of blossoms, new birdsong every few minutes, and just hot enough for your skin to smell like summer.

(-) I am stuck inside wrapping up this semester's work.

(-) How do I always find myself on the cusp of summer with nothing to wear but long pants, long sleeves, and dark colors?

(+) jackshoegazer and I are going to Iowa on Friday with brdt and strangedasein to see choogy and her les husbou! Hm...Bridget has a hubby, Lauren has les husbou...I need a good name for Jeremy.

(-) Sandwich is already gone! Where did it go?!

(+) I get the award for the Best Paper Presented at the Geography Student Symposium tomorrow...and it comes with $100!

(+) I've been inspired to try and make some sort of lemon ginger cupcakes for this weekend. Any ideas?

(+) Super Nintendo comes today! I bought it on EBay with some of the favorite games of my youth (Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Super Mario World, Super Star Wars, Donkey Kong Country...and it's coming with Wheel of Fortune, too!).

Back to work!

At last, the long-awaited San Francisco photos. Grab some popcorn and your best girl (or boy), sit back, and enjoy. This is a representative sample of the 206 photos I took over the course of four hours and four miles' worth of walking.

First, the teaser:



The main gate of Chinatown, just a few blocks north of our hotel.

The end!

I'm up too early. Late. Early. I did go to bed a little after ten, but woke up at midnight, so is that a nap, or a legitimate transition from yesterday to today?

I took a cab to College Library, where they finally printed my poster (when I went to pick it up after dinner they said they "forgot"). I spent most of yesterday working on it, and it's sufficiently dressed up to hide the skimpy data, without scads of text. It's good to learn how to balance these things.

Anyway, the cab: "Feel Like Makin' Love" came on as soon as I got in, and the lady driver and I talked about houseplants for the duration of the eight-minute ride. Now I'm staring at College Library (open twenty-four hours, incidentally, and named by Playboy Magazine as one of the nation's ten best places to get picked up) from my lab, and trying to convince myself that I'm not going to get a migraine as punishment from deviating from my regular sleep cycle. In about fifteen minutes I'm going to take my suitcase, my poster tube, and my backpack across the street to the Memorial Union to catch the bus. The efficiency of this triad is particularly comforting.

I am resisting the urge to look at my printed poster; at three by four feet, there would be no time to correct any mistakes, and I'm too tired to unroll and reroll it. I am thinking that I'll jinx it if I look at it before I get to San Francisco tomorrow. Today. A 2:20am bus to Chicago, and a 10:20am flight to Oakland, and some undetermined mode of transportation to my hotel are all that stand between me and a bed. Considering that I was just in bed an hour and a half ago, it seems a bit inefficient, but I'm past questioning.

In forty minutes, I'll be on a Coach USA bus (they don't seem to excited about Greyhound in the Midwest) to Midway Airport, with my Albums to Fall Asleep to On the Bus on iPod rotation: Low's Long Division, Didn't It Rain by Songs:Ohia, Hope Sandoval's Bavarian Fruit Bread, the Cat Power Covers Record, and Ghosts of the Great Highway by Sun Kil Moon.

See you on Pacific time.

Tomorrow we leave for the Upper Peninsula. Yesterday we spent the day being incredibly busy, and Jeremy only resisted a little. So far he's been very tolerant of the fact that I'm a do-er, and would rather get up early on a Saturday morning than sleep in; I always associate sleeping in with a depressive lethargy, and I've found it contributes to my migraines. We went to the Farmer's Market on the Capitol Square, which was Ethan's first time. I gave him his own spending money to buy anything he liked, and he chose a tiny flowering cactus, some osterich jerky, and some beef jerky. We ate fresh-baked pastries, bumped along the flow of traffic going counter-clockwise around the capitol, bought local honey, pumpkin butter, Tahitian bridal veil in a hanging pot, farm fresh brown eggs, fresh catnip, and sacks full of vegetables.

We followed that up with a trip to REI's quarterly Scratch & Dent sale, where we discovered a Sierra Designs Bedouin 4 tent (which normally retails for $299) for $89 because one of the zippers sticks a little when you pull from the outside for about four inches, and the rainfly zipper is slightly off center but works perfectly. Go us! I joked with Jeremy that Sierra Designs is "the family brand," which has been a bit of a recurring thing lately. I've realized that I can be very brand loyal- it gives me a sense of comfort, somehow, to pick out the Red Gold canned tomatoes, Annie's dressing, Garden of Eatin' chips, Stoneyfield Farms yogurt. It's that 1950's housewife thing cropping up, I think (funny how it expresses itself with a fierce loyalty for Chacos over Tevas).

I attempted to give blood after lunch, and was told by the Red Cross staff that they were closed. They didn't know anything about the extra hours, and had never heard of "1-877-BE-A-HERO." I called the number and in a few minutes cleared up the confusion; apparantly that's for a differet center, and one in Milwaukee at that. I had been misinformed! Sadly, southeastern Wisconsin will have to suffer without my blood.

It was a bit of a buzz kill, which we alleviated by going to the brand-new community pool for a few hours- we even live within walking distance. We didn't have facilities like that where I grew up; I'm used to swimming in the ocean, in shallow creeks, in murky-bottomed ponds. This had lanes for lap swimming, a deep end with diving, deep and shallow-ended basketball hoops, a sort of dunking seat for handicapped access, giant waterslides, a huge shallow kiddy area with interactive devices that spew water in every form and direction imaginable, and more. I watched the babies being impossibly cute, and swam, and cheered Ethan off the diving board, and stretched out in the sun and read. For a moment, I recaptured that feeling of summery infinity that I haven't felt since I was small.

The forecast for the UP next week is a neat little row of smiling rayed suns, and Bewabic State Park is along a large lake. I'm going to shame my alabaster Irish extremities into darkening, and catch up with my 50 Book Challenge, avoid family drama, and sleep under the stars for an entire week. I'm off to load the car - we're leaving bright and early tomorrow morning.

Speaking of which, thanks to brdgt for looking after the herd (of cats) Thursday- Sunday. If anyone is interested or available to check in on them Tuesday & Wednesday (and even Monday, if you like, for an evening visit), please let me know with a comment and we can make arrangements. I'll bake you bread or buy you wine, and you can eat anything you find in the house!

I finally got through to my dad about the Michigan travel plans for next week. We started planning the trip months ago, but he's been distracted with his Ukrainian bride. Apparantly they've been camping and driving around the country for the last few weeks. He sounded grumpy that his tent was too short and he couldn't get dressed inside, so they "bought a new one." I translated that to mean, "I'm resentful that I'm getting old."

He was cross and condescending about the fact that, having not heard from him and with the 4th rapidly approaching, Jeremy and I made camping reservations at Bewabic State Park in the Upper Peninsula. $115 for a week of camping was "too expensive," and our buying a tent was "unnecessary" because he apparantly wants to give us his (the one that's too small for his aging body to accommodate). Never mind the fact that we have Ethan, and that he would have been irritable no matter what I decided to do. I can tell he's feeling guilty, because his first instinct is to lash out.

He should feel guilty. When he and Cathy divorced, I thought that meant that finally, after years of exile, our relationship would be saved. Last January he e-mailed me the day after he married a Ukrainian he'd met on a train in Prague after rejecting a Latvian woman he'd met on the internet. I had to write a letter to INS attesting that his relationship with Alla is "loving, honest, and committed," so they wouldn't think it was a sham marriage. The closest my father has ever come to criticizing the government is when he was wading through the red (white and blue) tape necessary to get a fiancee visa for someone he'd only met in real life once.

Essentially, since his marriage to Wife #4 (my mom was #2) I have barely heard from him, and when I finally have called him our conversations last about five minutes before he has to go spend time with his blushing bride. As soon as she moved here from the Ukraine, she decided she missed her son (about 20), and so Dad paid to have him fly to the US. He's spent more time with his new stepson in the last six months that he and I have spent together in the last six years.

(I'm not bitter, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not...).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

I also learned on the phone (in our brief conversation in which it was conveyed that he still thinks of me as a child) that my Uncle Steve and Aunt Joanne from Canada are likely not coming to the family reunion. These are my closest aunt and uncle, and are some of my niftiest relatives. The fact that they're probably not coming does not bode well for the week- Dad's always more at ease around them, and Joanne knows how to keep him in line. They're half the reason I wanted to go up in the first place.

Basically, I'm dragging Jeremy and Ethan up to the UP for what will probably not be the exciting family ruinion event I was planning for. For this reason, I have decided that the purpose of this vacation is for Jeremy, Ethan and I to be a family; to camp, swim, canoe, hike, lounge and drive around the UP in search of adventure. If this happens with my father's participation, then that's lovely. If not, then we have one another, and the lakes and forests and mosquitoes and half-melted s'mores and sunburned shoulders and campground showers and way more stars than we could ever, ever see in Madison.

In less than six hours I need to be on a bus heading for an airport in Chicago. This is the only bus, of course, that will get me there in time for my noon flight to Manchester (New Hampshire, not the one across the pond). Every time I fly, I manage to arrange my time so that I don't start packing until at least eleven at night (correction: doing laundry before I can pack). I tend to live far away from airports (a good three hours on average), so if I'm taking a bus for a morning flight I always end up stumbling onto a Greyhound between 2am and 5am. Every time, frantic and cranky with sleeplessness, I swear to myself never, never again. And here I am.

I have a backpack full of books to read (and two more to review) towards my 50 Book Challenge, and a small suitcase full of clothes and toiletries (or I WILL when my laundry is done). Add my laptop bag and I'll look like any other twenty-something grad student visiting home. This is my first vacation (can I really call it that?) since...March of last year, before my last senior trimester. I spent winter and spring breaks here in the lab, and last summer I moved to Madison almost immediately after graduating. Tomorrow I'm heading home to spend some time with my mom, (step)Dad, sister Jillian, and brother Josh. Chihuahua Annabelle, Siamese cat Pepper, and Pepper's leftover children Skittles and James will also be right where I left them.

Twelve days. Twelve days to rest, read, think, stratagize, be with some of the people I love, miss the rest, and watch my best friend marry the woman of his dreams. The day after I get back to Madison, it's off to Indiana for a research coring trip. I'm dreading this like work, rather than fun, but that's to be expected pre-vacation. If I survive tomorrow's thunderstorms in Chicago and rain in Manchester, my next dispatch will be from the Green Mountain State. Vermont is really it's own universe, governed by its own laws; at times I'm amazed it exists. I should need a passport, or special permission from the governor to visit. My preception of the world is altered somehow by the time I've spent there; I spend so much time forgetting the rest of the country can be so cold, so hard, so wrong.

Golden days. I wish I had summers off again, with immortal afternoons to fill to the brim, and autumn just a hazy inkling. The years I spent in Italy were those epic kinds of summer days (I just finished Black Swan Green, so "epic" now has a hallowed place in my vernacular) that now seem like they were lived by someone else. The memories are color-saturated; the half-pipe shingled rooves the color of ripe peach flesh near the pit, blue-green water hiding mermaids' grottos.

I wanted that water again, yesterday, but it was more than that - my wanderlust had me by the wrists like a five-year-old and wouldn't let go. I tried to pitch my Guatemala dream to Jeremy- Tikal and all the best ruins're there- but when Ethan was factored in, I realized we'd never be able to afford it and it's not safe enough for a pre-teen, anyway. The five-year-old reached towards Mexico, the Yucatan; this would satisfy the need for beryl water lapping sugar-fine sands, and the ruins were nearly as good near Cancun. The price tag was much more friendly to our young-and-pre-career budgets, too.  We decided, in the end, to start saving one hundred dollars a month in October, and by spring break we'd have $1600 between the two of us and we'd be able to at least double that with our income tax returns. Depending on the piggy-bank finale, we'd either hit the Mayan Riviera or the Southwest for our vacation (Anasazi cliff-dwellings, the Grand Canyon, the works!).

On the way home from dropping off Ethan I realized that I'd be writing my thesis next spring and would probably want to spend Spring Break like a hermit rather than a hermit crab. Our plans were modified accordingly; we'd save through June and take Ethan to Europe- maybe even to the very archipelago of my memories! The Vacation Fund was started, if only in our intentions. Our hopes would make it happen.

And then today I got a telephone call from the latest in a chain of collection agencies that MBNA sold my outstaning credit card account to. In 2000, for various and sundy reasons including dating someone with the financial maturity of a Cadbury Cream Egg, I stopped making payments on a credit card that had a balance of $1200. It was the usual story; late payment fees, over-the-limit fees, and then bobs-yer-uncle! I'm in over my head, and no matter what I can send them it's not enough to tread water. I'm in school again, and jobless, young and foolish, bad decisions, etc, etc, and here we are, six years later and waiting for the statute of limitations to knock the bugger off my credit report (along with several other buggers, I might add). With less than a year left, I get a phone call from a creditor to let me know the debt is in the "credit attorney stage," and that I could settle now for half of what I owe ($1600 of the now $3200) or make a payment arrangement on the order of $100-$150 a month. Failing that, a judgement would be assigned and I'd have my wages garnished, according to the ever-so-friendly man on the other line. He wants to be my friend. I'm in need of one, lately, but I don't know if he's the kind I need.

My head is full of noddling but's and I can't seem to find a quiet place to think.

(But in less than a year it would go away, assuming the guillotine didn't fall first.)

(But if they did sue, I'd have a judgement on my public record, which is not very pleasant.)

(But I made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to hide from creditors anymore; that I'd start working through things (on my own time and of my own initiative) instead of ostrich-plugging my way across this fiscal desert.)

(But it's my vacation money.)

If I weren't in grad school I'd join the Peace Corps and ask them to send me somewhere without electricity.

Today is grey, damp, and cool; lovely if you're a mushroom or an amphibian, and especially lovely if you're a graduate student finishing up the final draft of your thesis proposal (due today, of course). By the end of the day, my roadmap for the next year will be inscribed in the stone foundations of Academia. It is a soft, malleable stone (more like silly putty, I suppose), but I don't forsee my research plan changing much in the next few months. Today is the last day of classes, and next week is finals week (I have just the one Statistics final), and a whole pile of papers and work is due by then. Monday I finally meet with my advisor to go over my preliminary data and strategize for the rest of the summer. The bad news is that I'll be in the lab every day during business hours this summer; the good news is that they cold-water AC was installed, so I don't have to slave in a room with sealed windows wearing long pants, a lab coat, gloves, and a face sheild. We paleoecologists must suffer so for our art!

I've got a busy bit of schedule ahead of me this summer:

June 7-18: Vermont for Steve's (one of my two best friends) wedding and the annual visit with friends and my family.

June 19-24: Yes, the day I return from Vermont I'm shipping out to northern Indiana to core Spicer Lake and take a second core from Appleman, my research site. I always imagined myself doing research in some sexy, mountainous location. Instead, I'm in Amish country in the flat, humid midlands.

July 5-9: Upper Michigan for a family reunion. My dad and his new Ukrainian bride will be there. Jeremy and Ethan are coming along for this one, which should be fun.

August 16-20: Bozeman, Montana for the American Quaternary Association (AMQUA) meetings. If all goes well, x_pyewacket_x and I will try to fly out early to visit Glacier, if time and money allow. Either way, I can think of worse places to hold meetings (like ESA's decision to hold theirs in Memphis in August. Right).

Stuck at home all summer? Wish you could travel? Live vicariously through the eyes of a 25-year-old, American, female graduate student! Being the unabashed fan of snail-mail that I am, I'd like to send out postcards from my various trips this summer. Postcards are cheap and more fun than, say, mosquito bites, or having your flight cancelled. If you'd like to be on my postcard mailing list, comment with your address (I'll screen them). This of course includes my friends living "across the pond" as they say.

And now, back to our regularly-scheduled programming. Today's special: Jacquelyn Gets Carpal Tunnel. Stay tuned!

I really should get better at managing the internal dialogue that eventually gets transformed into livejournal. Between the trip to Vermont and the craziness on either end, I of course managed to go so long without writing that this became its own obstacle, as though if I waited long enough I could sneakily post some poem about crunchy brown leaves or a rumination on the chest freckles of over-tanned middle-aged women, and no one would even have noticed I was gone. I wonder what's worse- not being noticed when you're there, or when you're not?

So of course Jeremy and I made it back safely, and those of you who read jackshoegazer will realize that things went well, if a bit long as far as New York state is concerned. The Boston fern feels much more at home atop a bookshelf, and as I can now eat my dinners off of real china at an actual kitchen table I feel positively decadent. Never mind the fact that I am curretly suffocating beneath the sumo-wrestling champion that is grad school, my limbs frantically wiggling from beneath a copious, black loincloth-covered bottom to grasp my laundry, my dishes, my computer...I have two big exams due this week and a couple of lab reports to write, and I am rather on the under-side of preparedness. Everything I brought back from Vermont is covered in storage-dust and mildew (though no more than a couple remnant mouse droppings, please-god-let-me-not-get-the-Hanta-virus-amen), so of course I'm allergic to everything I brought home.

Have I mentioned that Jeremy is seventy-seven shades of incredible? After putting up with my family, with the obscene drive across a third of the country in a rented mini-van during torrential downpours and gale-force winds and Indianan truck-drivers, days of fast food, and the horror of seeing his woman in a poofy down vest...well, suffice to say he could have left me at any number of very accommodating truck stops along highway 90, and chose not to. I think this one's a keeper.

And I totally spent Saturday up to my shins in mud in a 2-meter deep trench. I was digging out a sediment column from a buried bog, and we were pulling out logs and branches that had been buried for 13,000 years, with the ends obviously beaver-chewed. Apparantly there is no record of giant beavers (we're talking black-bear-sized here, folks) chewing on trees like their wee modern cousins. Anywhere. Ever. To the point where people have said that they must not have done it at all. There is also no site in the state of Wisconsin with a macrofossil record for this time period, either. We've got leaves, cones, seeds, green beetles' wings, roots, cattail leaves, and all manner of goodness, all buried since the end of the last ice age. If you're really nice to me I'll let you touch my mud.

I'm off in a bit to pick up surrealkitten from the airport (or, rather, to escort her from the airport, as I can't actually pick anyone or anything up unless they are very wee, since I don't have a vehicle). She's in town for a couple of days checking out the linguistics program. We've known each other since the Goddard days, and haven't seen one another in about two years. I had a series of dreams last night involving stray cats with fleas, a giant baby that stuck to the bathtub, hippie radicals living in an abandoned house on an island surrounded by perpetual whirpools, and a bunch of rednecks in Applebees looking to join the Army. Jeremy says the dream means I need to worry about myself for a while not not other people, so I'm going to be a terrible hostess and study for my exam and write my lab report instead of taking Iris out on the town tonight. Every time I start to feel guilty my arm starts hurting just above the elbown on the inside. Is it possible to get stigmata if you're not Catholic? Last night I was kicking off my unders before getting in the bath, and I kicked the doorframe accidentally, taking off a chunk of my toe in the process. And on Saturday I sliced my finger open on a sharp chunk of glacial till hanging out menacningly in the clay at the bottom of my sediment record. It's all on the right side, so far. I wonder what it all means? Since my idea of google-mancy has already been taken, I'm going to patent injurymancy.

Aren't you glad I'm back? Don't worry, I'll be back to esoteric ramblings on the curvature of streetlamps, and vague poetry about index cards and dusty carpets. I just had to get the last week out of my system. Silly Jeremy wrote beautiful poems and thoughtful posts. You should prolly go read those. My head is in such a muddle lately. I read in Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide To Graduate School or some such title that, on a standardized scale where 100 points is the level of stress experienced by someone who has just experienced the death of a spouse, that the average first-year grad student expereinces on average 337 points of stress. I can't believe no one's found a way to capitalize on this yet. Except for the guy who wrote the book, of course.

I leave for Vermont tomorrow, with Jeremy. We're both a bit stressed, sadly, which I hope won't have a negative impact on the trip. For my part, as long as I manage to remain productive even though I'm "on vacation" for the next couple of days I should be fine, and by the time the weekend arrives I'll be able to settle down. Silly grad school, sleep is for kids!

I'm doing laundry, packing, preparing. Mentally priming myself for the trip, making sure I'll be in the right headspace. This will be the first time Jeremy and I have embarked on a significant adventure together, and we'll be in one anothers' company nonstop for the next week. I'm really excited, but I also want to make sure that I'm available for him and not completely caught up in the stresses of it, and with everything else going on. He'll be meeting my family, and seeing a side of me that most people don't get to see. He'll be meeting some of my closest friends, and seeming me in that context. I've never dated anyone that my family and friends have completely approved of, in retrospect, so I'm trying to remind myself that the anxiety I feel about sharing him with everyone is really all in my head. I love him: everyone else will, too.

If you stop and think about it, holidays in our culture are a bit on the wonky side. We spend weeks (months, even!) preparing for them, and then the instant they're finished all trace of them is obliterated and it's as though they've never been. In many historical cultures, the celebration extends on the other end of the holiday, and begins with the event itself. Now that Halloween is over, the gaudy paper cut-outs and crumpled black streamers seemed to disappear overnight. Yesterday they started putting up the giant snowflake light fixtures on the streetlamps along State Street, and we've carted out the holiday decorations, cd's, and dvd's at Borders. I genuinely ache thinking of a future time when, no longer working retail (will such a time ever truely be?), I will get into the season like everyone else, like children and the elderly. I've held out, though, desperately clinging to the scent of evergreens and the way the first snow crunches under your feet, refusing to completley give up on the hope that I'll have that feeling again someday. I'll be spending Christmas alone this year (with my cat, not alone, not alone!!), and I think I'll get a little tree and decorate. Maybe I'll have a Christmas party. Maybe I'll leave cookies out for Santa and carrots for the reindeer. I'll get Christmas dvd's from Netflix and drink cocoa with a candy cane dipped in it on Christmas eve, Figaro on my lap. I'll get him a stocking and a pile of presents and maybe I'll let him have a sip of rummy eggnog if he's very good and doesn't knock over Santa's milk glass.

I grew up in the ubiquitous closeness of the Appalachians' gathered folds, and the rounded peaks and river-ribboned valleys were always intimate in their proximity, in the familiarity of their ancient ice-worn contours. Driving to Indiana, the sky was nearly white with haze, and the yellow-brown ditch grass seemed at once bent with drowning and paper-dry in the baking heat. The land lolled, sides heaving, sweat-drenched. Stunted corn lined the asphalt and spread to each tree-thickened ditch. I have seen the tiniest of antelope unfazed by the weight of the bluest sky, its elfin horns too low to toss clouds about like dandelion fluff. I have settled on the rain-grey dark of the sea and watched a cloudless dawn and never blinked once at infinity; but I closed my eyes and gripped the wheel against this hugging, wide heaviness. I searched for lakes that had given up to that thick air, their ghosts feeding goldenrod and brown-eyed Susans. What water still stood was choked with nuphar and frogs' eggs, reedy and mud-still.

Where Indiana meets Michigan the highways are lined with cars and freight looking to be somewhere else; not far from these unfazed itinerants are the closed black buggies of the Amish, with their incongruous triangular reflectors. The forced gait of the dark horses has worn channels along the shoulders of the two-lane roads. The horses' eyes are shaded on the sides and they do not seem happy. Eating raspberry custard pie in a small restaurant, I watched a group of teenaged Amish stand at the counter and order pizza, cheeseburgers, chicken strips. The girls wore flip-flops on feet with painted nails, and their toes twitched nervously beneath polyester and elastic frocks that sagged on their slender frames. The boys waved to one another and shuffled and leaned, shoved and laughed too loudly. They seemed like actors in a poorly-costumed high school play about Amish people. One girl's dress was made of a shiny, wrinkled blue satin that could have come from an 80's prom dress. One girl had a Hello Kitty wallet. I wondered if they'd walked, or had taken a black buggy.

After a travel experience that was quite possibly a glimpse into pergatory (which is almost impressive in that everything left on time and very little unnecessary waiting was involved), I am back in Vermont. When I stepped off of the plane into the Manchester airport I couldn't help but think, like Spaulding Gray, "Ah...MY people." It seems to come up in conversation lately that New Englanders, or northerers in general, are rude. I've come to the conclusion that we're just private. Walking up to someone with a big grin on your face and asking all kinds of personal questions (which you will likely then divulge to all the other "friendly" people) is rude. New Englanders are private and genuine. We don't like presumption. Of course, any kind of urban environment automatically negates regional differences, so experiences in, say, Boston cannot be extrapolated to the entirety of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Not to mention the fact that, yes, New Yorkers did indeed flock to the northeast after September 11. Perhaps the "rude" individuals are misplanted Manhattanites. I've never been to Manhattan, so perhaps I'm being unfair. However, I stand by my initial assertion quite indignantly- New Englanders are NOT rude. At least not any ruder than anyone else anywhere in the country.

I didn't realize how much I missed this place until I came back. This kind of in-situ nostaligia washed over me in along the drive north from the airport, as I stared sleepily out at the rolling greenery, the red barns and proper black-and-white spotted cows, the brick mill buildings, and the victorian libraries and churches. I couldn't help but think of the Union soldiers who, lost among the strange trees and the aberrant warmth and the devilish red clay of Georgia, must have longed for this place. Every mile north must have taken them closer to that familiar landscape- winding little rivers, granit outcroppings, spruce trees, puritan-white houses, corn fields surrounded by sugar maples. When I was little I traveled so much that I imagined that if someone put my in a landscape I'd be able to feel where it was even with my eyes closed. As I grew older I amended this slightly, for practicality's sake, I suppose, to being that I could tell where I was just be looking around me (lacking any geographical indicators) and getting a sense of the landscape and the quality of the air. Back in Vermont, I think I could do it with my eyes shut.

I don't know what I was hoping for when I got here, but I must be something of a cock-eyed optimist. It's good to know that I haven't lost that quality, if it is a quality and not a deficiency. I think the same useless food is still in the cupboards: Lipton alfredo noodles and instant mashed potatoes but no butter or milk, Hambuger Helper but no hamburger. The piles of dirty laundry throughout the house seem bigger than usual, and the place more unformed and chaotic. Everyone seems impossibly tired. Last night, looking for sheets to put on the bed in the guest room, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it will feel like to have my own home again, and if that will actually feel like home to me in the same way that it did when I was small.

Warren is here, in Vermont. I'm not supposed to know this, but now I do. The fact that there is a possibility of seeing him throws me into an unbearable sense of anxiety. I feel like an invisible boundary has been crossed. I don't go south, he doesn't come north - it's a tacit understanding. I feel violated, which isn't really justifiable, as he spent years of his life here and made connections that he still keeps. It's been almost a year since the silence on his end, which I think frustrates me the most about his being up here; he's chosen not to respond to my completely friendly non-agenda e-mail (he was the one who had agonized about us "remaining friends" after the breakup, and so I assumed it was a priority). He's written me out of six years of his life history, including the fact that I am completely tied to this place. I feel like a ghost, like a non-person. I feel like a year and a half later I shouldn't be feeling like this. I wouldn't take him back into my life if he begged me; it's not about that. It's about how easily I can be forgotten.

Tomorrow I fly back to Madison, after a week in Colorado and a week in Upper Michigan. I was in my father's country for the first time without him, and in fact my being there had nothing to do with him. I have tried several times to write about it, and every time Internet Explorer (my father's computer, of course- I'm a sworn Macintosh convert) crashes. This must be some kind of sign, though I've been surprised at how painful it feels to have so many thoughts and memories sifting out of my grasp; that potential to forget. I almost feel as though I've lost time.

Here I am, updating for the first time in two weeks, and all I can talk about is livejournal. Not loons, or sunburns, or late-glacial lake-mud. Not the Generic Motel (now $25, up from $10 when I remember it as a little kid) or pasties. Not antelope and prairie chickens and green chiles and Dr. Zhivago and Scrabble. Or seeing siblings I haven't seen in four years, or hugging the woman who was for a long time my stepmother and possibly the only person I have ever hated (not possibly the only person, but possibly hated).

Not...Daddy. Dad. Sam. Who calls me "Ba'kins," still- short for Baby-kins.

How 'bout them (Red)Sox?