Home. Home, sweet home. My mind is aswirl with the events, sights and conversations of the last 3 weeks, but I would never trade any of that for anything.

So many chances, so many choices, so many good people.

My mind has not yet clicked back to being home. In America. We’ve been constantly moving for almost 3 weeks, traveling from country to country and crossing borders where the language (and the customs) change in the span of hours. My internal chatter has become a creole of French, German and Ukrainian, and at the Safeway when someone hands me my bag, I don’t know how to say a simple “Thank you.” I am confused by my own customs, not yet aware that I can let down that guard, I can stop thinking “I’m an alien” because I am not. I am home. I am here.

California welcomes us back with open arms. It’s Halloween, but the leaves are still green and the sun shines down from pure cerulean skies. Coming from a land with few women and no children, it’s sweet to hear the giggles of the young in silly costumes, even nicer to hear them bicker about candy as they rap on our door.

After three weeks of rain, clouds and cold, wearing the same three shirts rough with handwashing in all-purpose soap, it’s luxury to pull on soft, faded jeans and impractical (but cute) boots. I’ve suffered too long being a practical, dumpy traveler with the backpack. Now I am me. I love style and fashion and footwear just like the next girl, really.

I’ll page through my photos and muse the coming movie project. If I’m lucky, I’ll go through my now-battered travel journal and pull from it the snippets of conversation and memory that I recorded at cafes far, far away.

I did everything I could to keep the moments fresh in words, pictures and sound. Let’s see what becomes of them.