pictures!

Ah, pictures.  Gotta love 'em. 

I just learned how to use picasa...how great. 

here are all of them: www.picasaweb.google.com/kate.dugan8/Ireland

enjoy!  for a usually no-photo gal, I sure did snap a lot:).  one of the funny highlights were the street signs that leave little room for imagination.  indeed, we enjoyed the thrill of coasting down a near-shoulderless road after we passed this one.

coming home

it's a funny thing, coming home.  there is a surprising familiarity to this place, this place in alaska i had months ago decided felt too foreign to ever be home.  and yet.  i find myself savoring this sunny day, happily folding laundry, sitting slowly on the steps to read a book in the air that smells of lilacs.  i am surprised to feel an odd sense of contentment here.

where did it come from?  is it only in the going away that i feel it?  does that mean its very real or very false?  or is it just about this moment in time?  

i have oodles of pictures to post to this languished blog.  10 days in ireland were a blast.  one thought is here: www.youngadultcatholics-blog.com (the post called "st. bridget"...that's right, i'm a blogger for young adult catholics.  every other friday.  stay tuned!).  i will post them soon.

for now, greg just arrived home with oodles of crabs from the crabpots on north douglas.  yum!

summer.  its summer. even in juneau, it comes.  i think i forgot.

boston. and john cougar mellencamp.

so i'm in boston for the week and it seems like there should be so much to blog about, so many things.  i mean, this is the metro area where i first started this unyieldy thing in the first place.  i am stunned to realize my lack of nostalgia for this place.  yesterday, i strolled through my old stomping grounds on harvard square and the yard and felt no yearning to return.  i have yet to step foot on the div school, so maybe there...but it's weird.  the lack of emotion i have bound up here.  

i have such mixed emotions about my two years at harvard. i mean, on one hand, i discovered and named a love of american religion.  its a curiosity that carries me through newspaper headlines and makes me nag at greg to hook me up as a religion stringer at the empire.  but it's also this place that, in some ways, ate at my soul. as i slowly gain back some of the weight i lost in this place and find a rhythm that is not rife with stomach aches and stress, i do not miss that part of the person i became here. 

maybe its because the part of harvard that i liked continues to be a real part of my life--work with jen on the book continues, even a real-live thing these days (not just in our fervent emails!) and i use what i learned about religious pluralism in america all the time.  

and it is weird to visit a place where so many of the people i knew here have left, moved on, switched gears.  i had a happy dinner with amy & eric tonight--and even though they still live in the same apartment, all is different (as it should be!).  our conversations were about nonprofit management and the oddities of being late 20-somethings and early 30-somethings; not the paper or book of the week.

as my eyes droop toward sleep, i can't help but think of my wedding song--john cougar mellencamp's "small town." particularly these lyrics: "still care enough to see who's in the big town...but my bed is in a small town. oh, that's good enough for me."