Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

Greetings, my patient and worthy readers.

I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting for that long week and a half while I had a fantabulous time out in Baltimore & DC. Awesome. Awesome time.

However, I'm not going to give you a travelogue, at least not today. Instead, you get to read something I wrote today on the train coming back (you lucky people, you) that's mostly pretentious ramblings that I only half agree with but that kept me entertained enough to forget, for a few minutes, that my bum had gone completely numb from sitting on it so long.

Enjoy.

Today, coming back on the train to Boston from the DC area, I saw a small house with white siding and large stones overlooking a meandering lake, almost a river. I noticed it, the sun flashed on the water and the scene was gone, almost before my brain had time to process the information my eyes had given it.

I’ve thought a bit about what it means to be in unfamiliar surroundings over this last week. The things I’ve seen have been both familiar and completely new, places I’ve seen a hundred times in photographs but never in real life: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building, the White House.

I expected to feel somehow different as I walked up and touched the Washington Monument or saw my reflection in the Vietnam Memorial, stood on the bank of the Potomac, saw the sword George Washington had carried into battle. But I didn’t. The truth is that visiting new places just means that it will be you walking around in a place that’s still a place. I think I expected to feel almost as though I were watching a movie about myself, detachment strongly flavored with a sense of utter significance. There was no such feeling. It was me, sunburned and footsore, happy to be there, and still entirely in my own skin.

I wonder if sometimes the allure of exotic locations is just simply the fact that we’ve never been there; we’ve never smelled Tokyo smog or chafed our hands in a Moscow winter. Once we have, the place becomes something we own almost; the unfamiliar becomes familiar, mundane, and we move on to the next location, eagerly seeking something outside of ourselves that we can never have, because we are always the same people seeing it.

Maybe that’s why I love staring out of the window so much when I travel. Seeing the land from the train, I can only see brief glimpses of these beautiful places, homes of people I’ll never meet, rivers I’ll never wade through, grass that will never make my feet itch with its cool sharp blades. I can see white steeples on old churches and a hundred masts gathered together like Birnam Wood and the ghost of myself in the window wearing a green shirt, lips slightly pursed, regarding the landscape with shadowed eyes. And the land between where I’ve been and where I’m going is still mysterious, unknown, beautiful, and wholly unspoiled by my being in it at all.