Familiarity....

I have spent the last 5 weeks running around a city that has changed much, but in the same way, changed little.

While driving to the FedEx dropoff, I passed Ward Electric Supply, where my Grandfather and I would go when he needed parts for a job (He was an electrician). Ward Electric is in the same building, with pretty much the same folks running it.

I observed that I have spent the last five weeks driving my father's 1985 Nissan Pickup... the same exact truck I learned to drive on in 1989 (And the clutch hasn't gotten any more forgiving in the interveining years).

I just spent a few hours in a house that is the exact floorplan as my grandparents house (Because my Godmother had built the house using my grandparents' houseplans 50 years ago... and thus both houses are exactly the same).

As Conroe heads into a psudo-spring, the place is starting to smell like the city I have known over the last 33 years. Which is making me recall, with vivid detail, my childhood and seeking refuge in the air-conditioned living rooms of my grandparents (It has also been 80 degrees here).

I guess it is appropriate that I would spend these last few weeks in a place that is so familiar, I'm about to travel to a place that is very unfamiliar.

But Colorado was my home... but no one place was home, it was in my familiarity with my friends that was most comfortable. It was the people that I called home.

Here in Conroe, the people are going (I can count my remaining family on one hand), but the places are familiar.

In Japan, the culture is familiar... but I've never been there before...

Well, I have to shut the computer down and disconnect it... It's time to change homes again...

More later, from the other side of the ocean.