home again

In Eugene again, back home for a few thesis meetings and various chores. It is good to be home, if only for a few days. If only to check on the roses and the squash and tomatoes, to watch them grow and prop them back up when they fall. I carefully pull the weeds away from volunteers from the fallen tomatoes and squash of the year before.

It is good to be home to see my upstairs room transformed into Marylynn's new room and to watch Jerry bask in the sun in the backyard or curled up on my bed while I write. It is refreshing and warm and cozy.

I know somewhere inside it is refreshing because I know that tomorrow I'm going back to California with some perspective, more accomplished on my thesis, and a reminder of all my good friends who are not so far away. A reminder of how I met them, and renewed energy to meet new friends in my new home.

I've embraced every moment, having breakfast with friends in the light summer rain, lunch with others in the sun, and a late night dinner with Jenn on Skinner's Butte with a brilliant orange moon on the horizon. In the morning we snuck into Julie's backyard, kissed her kitty Oz through the window, and began to pick cherries, plucking them one by one or in bunches and dropping them into the basket we found waiting to be filled.

I climbed as high up as I could go, my bare feet feeling the curve of every step. I wrapped myself in the branches, looked up, and blinked at the sun peaking through the leaves, the burgundy sweet goodness glowing with afternoon light. I can't explain the feeling I get from pulling fruit from a tree, stretching as high as I can to pick the perfect cherry, the one just out of reach, but it is a perfect sort of feeling. One that settles me, and makes me feel at home wherever I might be.