You had to be there

The thing I heard most often after returning from a three-week trip overseas: "You have to tell me ALL about it!"

I've been back over a week now and I have yet to meet this demand to anyone's satisfaction, least of all my own. From the minute I got on the final flight home, things started to blur a bit in my memory. Captured images are good reminders, but it's the things that couldn't be recorded that slip away the quickest. I nearly forgot about setting off the London flat smoke alarm with toast (that was never actually toasted). And there was that time I was so engrossed in reading the museum map that I wound up in the men's bathroom, which was fortunately not occupied by anything but a distinct odor. And there were the competing Salvation Army brass bands playing on the same block, providing constant, if disjointed, Christmas music in downtown Bern. And running down an unknown street in South Hackney on a Sunday night, hoping I was pointed in the direction of the tube station and really hoping I'd get to it before the trains stopped running. Those are the moments I need to scribble on a scrap of paper before they disappear.

So, while I have already been pulled back into the patterns of my regularly scheduled life and picked up a few extra burdens for my brain besides, I will start to put down some words and pictures in the next few weeks. There are over seven hundred photos yet to be sorted. If I keep telling myself my own stories, the gaps may start to fill in a little. The Christmas trees may get posted just before spring, but they will be posted!