To the sweet sunny south take me home

In the past two days I've said goodbye to Ricky's host family (hard) and to Jørgen (easy) and finally to Ricky. I wrote my love letter to Denmark the night before I left and leaned out the window to read it aloud to the cold sky. On the plane I cried as we flew over Jutland, the yellow farmhouses and windmills hidden by the clouds.

The US feels familiar and strange at once - the position of the lightswitches on the wall, the clothes in my closet, the penny dropped on the floor, the way strangers say "bless you" when you sneeze all surprise me. The house is sweetly cedar-scented and still. Everyone else is asleep, but I've been up for hours. All is as it should be.

Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

- from "Lute Music" by Kenneth Rexroth