In which there is music and Massachusetts is an easily pronounceable word.

 

The sky did this really cool thing somewhere between Arizona and Massachusetts. Never had I seen day and night so clearly divided, at least not in one place and with my own eyes.

  

A while after that was taken, I landed in Boston (on the night side), landed in a bed, and had to wake up three hours earlier than when my body had just gotten used to waking up. The next few days consisted of mostly quiet things, spending a lot of time with my brother, doing last-minute preparations for the Big Few Days, going through the boxes of my life that I had hurriedly packed on Commencement Day and left in a friend's basement, expecting to come back after a year in Germany and need all these things again. There were many thoughts of what to keep and what to pass on into other hands, all of which revolved around the question of where I was planning to live for the foreseeable future. This became pretty clear to me as the pile of things to give away kept growing and as I started carefully wrapping up my favorite tea mugs and other sentimental-but-also-functional things, preparing them for a transatlantic journey.

 

Only in New England:

A brilliant name for a laundromat:

 

Passing time around South Station on a windy day. I sat on a bench at the edge of Chinatown and watched the cloud puffs zoom overhead, listening to Chinese-speaking families around me and imagining myself to be in a very different place.

 

 

 

Eggs, water, jelly beans, and a fat, yellow Hummer.

 

Shocked and a little heartbroken to find Ritter Sport and Milka at Rite Aid, of all places. Why does America have to have EVERYTHING? Haribo, too, but at least it's clear that the Gummibärchen have to take a chemical dye bath upon crossing the border.

And then there were American supermarkets. Whole aisles of salad dressings, twenty kinds of canned tomatoes, holy surplus. C'mon, is this really necessary?

The main to-do of this 'merica trip was the wedding of my brother & sister-in-law -- oh, bliss! In truth, none of the very few pictures I took ended up being any good. After having seen their work, I knew that the photographers hired to squint through the lens all day would to an amazing job, which of course is what happened. Here is their photographic summary of the day. There was no time or thought or want to take photos on my end anyway -- not with all that delicious revelling.

A few fleeting moments involved in the makings and happenings of the big day: cookies, day-before trying out the dance floor, parading T-takeover.

I did, however, take a few mini videos on my dinky Point&shoot. The quality is poor indeed, but it gives you a better idea of the wonderful chaos that was the wedding parade. After the service, we paraded to Harvard Square, down into the T and out again one stop later, finally switching party modes once we'd reached the reception location -- led by the B&G (or the J&G as the case may be) on t-bone and flute and one of the bands of which the brother is a part. Then came the food (the food!), the toasts, the silly socks, the contra dancing! (Followed by the resting, the quiet family togetherness, the bubbles on street corners.)

After the festivities and once all the family had gradually trickled out of town, I hopped on the bus and made my way to the Valley of Happiness to see my alma mater and many dear persons. Northampton hadn't changed a bit, though it felt strange to be at Smith as an alum -- there was a mix of a katrillion memories and feelings wooshing through my veins with all the familiar sights and smells, but on the other hand I felt somewhat excluded, as I had no key, no user ID at the library, no home. Overall it was a happy time, happy to walk the path to the swimming hole and see campus glimmering over Paradise Pond, happy to see so many keepers of our shared history, happy to sneak a photo of the ingredients list of my favorite café muffin so as to recreate them elsewhere, though I know they could never taste as tasty wholesome as in Noho.

 

 

Once out of the bubble, I went back to B-town to make last visits, have kickass cupcakes with my Kickass Cupcake, wrap up some Dunkin' Donuts in plastic (to preserve their freshness and nutrients) for the Germans, repack, and be fed a lot of amazing and endless lasagna and red wine before squeezing into my seat on a plane across the Pond. A couple hours waiting around Heathrow and I spread my wings and few back to Hamburg, cruising in through a beautifully crafted piece of sky.

Grateful to have had this precious time in so many of my homes and grateful to be back at home, I went to sleep. (My body, on the other hand, was not so grateful for having been subjected to three very different time zones in three weeks and had given up any sort of regular sleep schedule. Getting back to normality was kind of like having to restart a computer and wait for it to install 157 new updates. Yeah, like that.) One Sunday later and it was back to work, jetlagged and dreaming.