It is a rainy Saturday afternoon.  I've just come back in from doing my shopping.  Since the shops will be closed tomorrow, I have to do a little planning and figure out what I want to eat tomorrow.  I'm sitting with a cup of coffee, listening to Borodin's Symphony No. 1, wondering why the hell I'm so content.  Granted, it's good coffee.  (It took me a while to get used to Polish coffee, but now I do like it.)  Granted, it's a great symphony — modern, but with enough Romantic influences to make it somewhat soothing.  (Stravinsky would not be a good choice right now.)  But it's more than that.

The only way I can describe it is by saying I've rituals now, and a comfortable environment.  I've been here a year, and I've actually succeeded in making this place my home.  I have even put a few things on the walls — posters, pictures, unique postcards.  But wall-hangings do not a home make.

I realized what it was only today, in fact.  I had bought a new package of Vegeta, this wonderful spice mixture that makes scrambled eggs indescribably tasty (well, okay, it does have MSG in it so that might have something to do with it as well), and I had put it in a jar and opened the cabinet to put it with my other spices, and it hit me: I looked in that cabinet, and I realized this was home.  Why?  Because instead of the bare shelves that greeted me a year ago, there were jars of spices, a jar of rice, a bottle of soy sauce, a newly acquired bottle of sesame oil, some beans, a bit of olive oil, some vinegar.  It has taken me a year to collect all those things, to find a place for them so that when I think, "Okay, now I need to start the rice," I don't have to ask myself, "Now where did I put that rice?" as I did when I first arrived.  In other words, not only do I have "things," but these things have their own place.  And so, like my bottle of cummin seeds, I too have a place here now.  I've a home.  With one plant which I'm always forgetting to water, but it is merciful and tenaciously hangs on in spite of my negligence.  And an ever growing collection of books.  And a bottle of prized Johnny Walker Red which I got in Slovakia.  And clothes hanging to dry.  And dirty dishes in the sink.  All the things which indicate that I've been here a while and will stay for a while longer.

I remember some time ago when I was at my counterpart's house and, getting on my bike, I said it was time for me to go home.  She said that it was nice to hear me refer to Lipnica as "home."  When I was in Bocheniec a few weeks ago, I was eager to get home, and when I thought that, visions of Lipnica came to mind, not America.  I won't go into a long, sentimental exploration of what "home" is (I think it's simply where one feels most comfortable in a given environment.), but I am happy finally to be able to say that this is home.  I used to think that such a comfort is largely a state of mind.  But I'm no longer sure if that's entirely accurate.  Now that I've experienced being both very uncomfortable and very comfortable here, I can examine the past year and see what changes might have brought about the comfort.  Perhaps there is no cause-effect relationship.  I suppose that if truth be told, there never really is in real life.  That sort of black and white reaction happens only in chemistry labs, and even not there all the time.  But I do know that the moments when I felt so down, so miserable when I first arrived, faded and never really came back once I met people.  Comfort comes from familiarity and friendship.  And it's not only in this situation, being a "legal alien" as Sting refers to it.  I think if I had moved around a lot as a child I would have discovered this simple fact long ago.  Yet living in the same place for so long gave me a grounding that I became oblivious to.  I made friends that stayed friends for many years, and while I was always meeting new people, it was with my close friends—my grounding — with whom I spent the vast majority of my time.  Looking back on it, I think this is what shook me up so when my friends began moving away a few years ago.  My grounding was crumbling underneath me, though I didn't consciously understand it that way at the time.

It's not a startling revelation until you actually live it.  In fact, many of you are probably saying, "Uh, Gary, you're just now realizing that?"  I'm only realizing that because I'm living it, much more intensely than I ever thought I would.