Time flies when you're fun.

Right now I am sitting on the kitchen counter - my usual perch for telling Mom stories - reaching over the guitar in my lap to type stories to cyberspace. I'm at home. Marshall, Texas, where the air is warm and sunny and smells a teensy bit like cows and not at all like Oxford.

I'm home!! It's really blowing my mind. Every night when I lie down in bed, I kind of expect that I'll wake up in the basement of Crick as usual and hear Angela in the shower and Amy breathing gently next to me or typing at her desk. And Genny and Carl talking up a storm in the kitchen above my head. Then when I wake up, I think I'm there for a second and then I hear Mom. It's happy-sad. REALLY happy and REALLY sad.

I had one of the best four months of my life in Oxford. I feel so overwhelmed and filled to the brim with glowing memories, loved faces grown so familiar -- and 10,000 hours of stories. As I walked through Oxford for the last time, I remembered the first time and how everything was so wonderfully new and strange and beautiful. Now the streets, corners, facades, spires, places of Oxford are so familiar -- every little piece of architecture that was once a strange face is now layered with memories.

That monument is where we ate burritos from The Mission and Hutton's tongue burned off. | That curb is where Daniel got falafel every night during Lent. | That corner is where that girl wiped out on her bike and Nick laughed and then felt bad. | That's the lane I walked down every Monday to meet with Josh. | Emily and I talked about life along that river. | That library is where I studied. And studied. And studied. | There's my church. | There's where we got ice-cream almost every night at the beginning of the term. | There's the coach station, there's Sainsbury's, there's Addison's Walk, there's Frewin Court, there's Port Meadow. | There's Crick.

It seems like it just started and yet it seems a lifetime ago I trudged the snowy streets of Oxford wondering what the next four months of my life could possibly hold. Now I have stories to tell, friends to love and try to stay in touch with, a new stage of life to look forward to. Time flies when you're fun. :)

"What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from...."

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.