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.