First Impressions

The first sight of those European license plates gives me tingles. Squat and long with square numbers and a circle of stars: they are a forgotten familiarity suddenly made fresh. The air is muggy and hot like in Virginia, and I have been through the Frankfurt airport before, so it, too, vaguely lacks a sense of strangeness. But then we pull into the garage of this new place where I will live and it is indefinably, quintessentially German. It's something about the ratio of height to width and the white washed walls, or maybe it's just the door handles. They have flat bars of brushed steel where knobs would be, and I think they may be on the wrong side of the doors. Yet they are not on the wrong side--they're on the European side and they are letting my subconscious know that I really am here. I'm here in Europe and it's exactly right. It's not Berlin but it's Deutschland, and I am back in that strange in-between existence that I like best. I wrap the tension of "far-away-ness" and familiarity around myself and sink into my favorite comfort zone-- the one that inevitably stretches me. I am not from here, but this is home.