We’ve had a busy few months, preparing for a big 25th wedding anniversary trip to Iceland and England, then being gone for two and a half weeks, and coming home to recover and get back to every day life (recovery and reintegration took longer than I’d thought it would. I think it’s a sign of age, sigh!). It was a fabulous time and while I didn’t manage to blog about the trip here, I did do daily Trip Posts with photos on Facebook. if you follow me there, you can go back through my timeline and read about it.
Coming home after being in foreign lands for awhile always feels a bit jarring. Things and places that you’ve seen so often every day look familiar but a bit different, like you’re able to see everything with new eyes again… at least for a little while. It’s almost like your eyes, when not in daily automatic-pilot mode, take it all in fresh, and your mind wakes up: “so that’s what this place really looks like!”
Or maybe it’s just me. 🙂
I also noticed that some places I revisited when we came home just Feel Like Home– our local Blue Moon Cafe, our co-op, and the farmers markets. Especially the farmers markets at this time of year, since they’re all closed in Minnesota for the 6 months of cold weather. When they finally open in the late spring, it’s an explosion of color, smells, sights and sounds. Every weekend feels like a festival, and shopping the market is so much more fun than running into the dingy grocery store.
We had such a late spring this year and bad weather, so I hadn’t gone to the farmers markets much before we went on our trip (and there isn’t much actually blooming here until June here anyway). So when we got back from our trip, B and I headed out for one of our weeknd farmers market morning dates. I had such a feeling of excitement to see all the vibrant bounty everywhere I looked, blended with a familiar comfort as if sinking into a favorite pair of slippers. There were the booths I always see there, the faces of vendors and sometimes neighbors, the plants and veggies returning for another season, even familiar street musicians.
Appalachian-style dancing lures in a cute little guy
It all felt like home, sweet and wonderful. My heart overflowed with gratitude, to have this community, and these ever widening circles to feel at home in.
Leave a Reply