I was able to return to Dairyland for about 3 ½ weeks, to do it up right for the holidays. My awesome parents picked me up at the Madison airport, and that night at 4 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep and I opened up the fridge to find cottage cheese, Swiss cheese spread, brick Colby, etc....well, all was right with the world. In the following days there were cookies, a gorgeous tree, fires in the fireplace…and on Christmas Eve we drove around do-gooding post-blizzard: shoveling sidewalks, pushing a car.
It was great to tromp around in the snow (even better as the L.L. Bean-type rubber-toed boots I dug out of my parents’ laundry room closet are apparently in style this season). Sure, I saw a little white in Nagano, but Midwestern snow…surely e. e. cummings was referring to Wisconsin’s variety when he wrote, “The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.” Indeed, I was shut in for a few days of my visit, too afraid to try driving anywhere, but I did get to ‘shoe in the New Year in Eau Claire (photo of me below—and pun—stolen from my friend Drew), visit my friend Jesse’s new dollhouse in Dubuque, and strike it lucky enough to have none of my flights delayed or cancelled, both from Japan to Wisconsin and back, and during the brief trip to California that I took mid-vacation.
I’ve been back in Shizuoka, back to work, for a week now, and aside from a minor puncture wound, 4 days of harassment from a dump truck driver, and a trick executed by my roommate to get me to bite into a bar of green tea soap, everything’s pretty much back to normal. While I didn’t return from vacation with a suntan, silk scarves, scented soaps, or a wind chime made of coconut shells, I do have Butterfingers and that awfully delicious Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Life is lovely.San Fran phots soon.
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