and counting

Two nights ago I spent hours and hours trying to find a plane ticket, trudging through travel website after travel website like I was chopping through a marsh with a box cutter, looking for the ever elusive, speedy (less than 24 hours), cheap ticket to the States.Three days ago I found out I'll be leaving a month early, July 15, for home.  Now that feels like a strange word. All this time I've been giving that word, 'home', to Texas, more and more tentatively as I have felt a change coming on.  After recent time visiting America, I started giving the name to Armenia, and surely, as soon as I returned to the cottage in Stepanavan, I felt my entire soul relax.  Sitting in my arm chair with a hot meal and an episode of Mad Men, or baking cookies for my landsisters whom I can hear through my window playing in the garden, or the clapping of tiny pucks on the nardi board as my landlord, Artur, starts taking the game, singing "Aysor im orn e; aysor lav or e" ("Today is my day; today is a good day."), I feel at home.

I love that family. I am so thankful for that tiny house in their garden. I have never felt more at home, more in love with a space, than I have in this tiny house. And in less than seven weeks I am moving out. Reminds me of how I felt leaving my parent's house in Texas exactly two years ago. The taking-it-in time is here.  The missing is about to start.