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.