Summer is a lot like a teenage boy asking you on a date: it inevitably promises more than it can deliver. At the start of the season I just knew that, with all of the distractions of the academic year and being freezing all the time out of the way, I would finally get around to writing some short fiction, that I'd get to do some serious digging in the British Library, that I'd probably fit in a few day trips, track down the rest of my primary sources, and maybe even finish a draft of the PhD novel.
It probably surprises no one but me that none of that happened.
Most of what happened was drafting for both sides of my degree and discovering that sources exist that I have to have but absolutely cannot find, sporadically interspersed with making a wedding happen. And then when it absolutely could not get any messier or any more hopeless, I flew back to the states to visit my family.
During undergrad, when I went home, it was clear that the timeline had progressed while I was elsewhere. Now, not so much. I return, now, to the same spot where I left off, to a moment or two after hugging my parents goodbye at the airport. Like stepping in and out of Narnia. My trips to the States stitch themselves together in a not unpleasant way - and since they are so short (and possibly also because I'm not allowed to drive over there any more) it feels like I haven't aged when I'm there, like I'm still nineteen and walk the beach every morning at sunrise with my dad.
This trip, I overheard my mom explaining to one of our relatives something that I've tried to explain to her a few times but never thought had stuck: why it is that I am so much more comfortable in the UK than in the US. She emigrated from Sicily when she was a child, so even though she's never had an accent there are still ways in which she doesn't fit, culturally speaking, times when she has to remind people that they will have to explain to her something that they think is a given because, no matter how she sounds, she's still a foreigner. And even though I was born in the US, while I was there I had the same problem: because I don't sound different people often never realized that I don't have the same cultural context that they do. Now that I am somewhere that every word I say is a reminder that I am Not From These Parts, I don't have to explain that I was homeschooled, that I'm from an immigrant family, that my background is very different from that of whomever I'm speaking to. And after years of explaining, it is a relief to be able to hide under the label that my accent gives me.
In about a month, a fair subset of my family is going to be coming across for the wedding, most of them for the first time - my siblings have been shipped over to visit, but my dad has never left America before. And while I'm excited about the wedding, I'm perhaps even more excited to see how they react to where I live now, to see what they think of over here in contrast with over there.
And maybe just a little bit I'm hoping it will put an end to all of the ridiculous questions. While I was home, my cousin (the lawyer) asked if England had any beaches, and if we could all go to the beach while they were visiting. In October.
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