Beautiful and Ominous.

Fall has come to Norway and, like everywhere else, this means the light begins to yield.  It does so spectacularly, but it does so nevertheless.

The sun rises later, and at different angles.  It's light is more intense, as though it concentrates on penetrating the impending winter.  If it can slip past the evening clouds, sunsets are as wild as they are blinding.


The light puts up a good fight.

But dark is like a blue-black spreading bruise; it creeps across the landscape and swallows it. It encroaches constantly, the days getting darker and darker.

Autumn has always been a time for introspection- for a heightened degree of self awareness.  It has always been a time to take stock, to gather, to store.

This will be my last Norwegian Fall and will bring me inexorably to my last Norwegian Winter.  It is, indeed, time to take stock- of what I have learned here, of what I love here, of what I long to leave here and of what I want to bring with me.

Now is the time to remember and to plan.

On Homesickness.

The second time I went to New England was after a prolonged time in the deep south.  My tenure at Louisiana State University had come to a close (relatively successfully with the exception of bridges burned and hearts broken) barely the month before.  I was limping back, a hurt, tired, wounded girl with one sliver of hope: that the place I had fallen in love with those two years previous would have the power to heal me.

That's all I wanted- to live quietly in the mountains and heal myself.*

The entire drive up, my mind and stomach churned.  What if I was making the wrong move?  (At that point in my life, I was acutely aware of how wrong my moves could be- and what they could do to me).  What if I didn't love it there the way I once did?  What if I was remembering it wrong?  The whole place?  All of my experiences up there?  What if... What if... What if...?

Then I crossed the state line from Massachusetts into Vermont, began to climb the mountains, and the whole world settled down around me.

I was back.

Sometimes the memory of northern New England is like a an open wound- fresh, gaping, raw.  It's the  memory of green summers, wood-smoke falls, and dark winters.  It is the memory of home.**

It is a memory that comes back to me like a dream sometimes, like a phantom just at the edge of my awareness, teasing and haunting- following.  It's so present at the oddest of times- the occasional Norway morning in August: if it's not humid, or raining, it's cool and crisp and tastes like the fall in New England.  The drive into Bavaria as the mountains, the Alps, begin to take shape around you- especially in this season when the fog rises from them like smoke from a fire.

These moments, these memories, bring me home with such flash-bang intensity that they make me sick for it even in the moment.

So here I sit in Germany... in beautiful Alps country, longing for home.  Longing for a home that isn't truly mine, and a place that sometimes doesn't seem real.  I sit surrounding by such remarkable mountains and they simultaneously make me want to leap for joy that they are here, that I am here, but also go crawling back to the mountains that I love most- the gentle, rolling peaks of ancient chains- relics of the geologic past.

And that's where I am- body one place, heart another, head always in the clouds.



*Little did I know at the time that this would be the summer that started a two-year roller coaster of motion, followed by another two-years of self-discovery, recriminations, disgust.

**Even though I am not a born New Englander, I have spent enough time there- and more than enough time roaming around the rest of the world- to know that is as much a home as I have ever wanted.