Cada Dia, Estoy Más Aquí de Allí (Every day, I am more here than there)

The primary advantage to living in another country for a year (or longer, God I wish it had been longer) is that it forces you out of yourself and in doing so cures you of a kind of blindness. There is, for example, a spectacular view of hills which I had been driving past for seven or eight years and had never seen because I never looked up until I returned from Brno. As I drove that stretch of road, I was always watching the road, thinking about where I was going and what I had to do. For the longest time after we returned from Czechia, I was constantly aware of what my world must look like to a stranger. To be honest, I had always hated living in this town; I thought it ugly and the people most unpleasingly provincial. It is only in perceiving home as as strange culture that I began to really see some beauty in it. Last fall, the trees with their changing leaves were so vibrant that I wept for the intensity of the colors, just as I had wept at the beauty of the Czech countryside.

And this fall, though the weather forecasters promised only brown trees, there is once again such intensity of color that it is a real sensuous experience for me. I look at the colors, the chartreuse, alizarin, crimson, yellow ocre, burnt umber--pure color in the tree leaves and it positively takes my breath away. Everyone always says that the sun on such trees sets them ablaze, that they are like fire, and so they are, fires of pure color, waving, vibrating pigment. It is quite a change from the fall I knew in Brno where I learned to see and appreciate the the greys, the whites, the blacks, the silvers against the cerulean and cobalt skies of deep fall and an epic winter, and the very different quality of sound there. Though sounds are softer here because they are muffled by trees and by buildings framed in wood, I miss the clear, taught quality of sound and the sounds of my old home. I miss the church bells, the many sounds of the tramvays, the sounds of another language around me. It's just that now it seems I am more here than there; I am still not sure that I like it. In Brno, I was always "más aquí de allí". Here, it is a new experience for me. So I was wondering, do you know the movie,"The Wizard of Oz"? Have you any ruby slippers you might lend me?