home again

A single smile and 2.5 years vanished before my eyes: again I was poised before my sophomore year of college suffering the summer heat and humidity, the mosquitoes, the toxic herbicides, poison ivy, ticks, cat tails reaching far over my head working with John Johnson, an angry botanist and collector of antique furniture of a specific period in history. He smiled the way he did 2.5 years ago with his features all scrunched up and the glint of his small circular glasses. I was in a brewery in an old industrial park, very inconspicuous place, drinking with former coworkers from the natural resource crew of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. I was most excited to see John Johnson with whom I worked in tandem for the majority of those muggy summer days. It was cold now, winter time and we both had a perspiring pint in our hands of locally-brewed. My face was warm from the alcohol, and my mind was heavy from jetlag... had it not been just a few days prior that I made my 30 hour trip home from Nanjing to Chicago, a trip that took 4 planes? And was it not just the beginning of that day of departure that I hugged my closest friends of 4 months or less goodbye on the messy and disordered street, got into the taxi cab headed for the airport and looked back at them as they all stood waving, figures growing dimmer with the early morning smog and the fogginess of the cab's rear window. And I missed these few individuals, but in a happy way and not at all in a longing way. My whole four months had already beginned to make sense in my mind, that is to say, how I appreciated it so. And in the taxi ride to the airport, through the time I was first home, standing in the bar with John Johnson, all of this appreciation was setting in quickly like the water you sprinkle in soil to grow the plants.