Homesick

I drove back home to New Jersey this weekend - a quick trip, just Friday to Saturday - to see some older friends of my parents and a friend of mine I grew up next door to. And let me say this: I've been living in my area of the country for 30 years now. I've adapted. I'm comfortable here. But going "home"? It was like stepping into a warm bath. Familiar accents, speech cadences, conversational tics, as it were - they surrounded me and I mindlessly fell into them. They are the sounds of my youth, and they made me realize just how much effort I use in my day-to-day life to communicate in what is apparently NOT my native tongue.

I speak Jersey, and I'm not ashamed of it. I miss the easy give-and-take of  conversation; I miss the carelessly mangled vowels; I miss the rising inflections in declarative statements. One woman I visited had a repairman stop by to give an estimate while I was there; I almost wept with homesickness when he said the inevitable, "Well, I know a guy..." while discussing how to fix some stuck windows.

But Jersey is more than that - it's a shared approach to using communication, a sort of timing and knowing when to interrupt (hint: all the time) and knowing when to shrug and do a sideways tilt of your head. It's hard to describe, really; and probably, if you've lived there all your life, you're not even aware of it. But as an ex-pat, I certainly am. And now that I am back home, where I've lived for most of my adult life? I feel as though half of my communications skills lie dormant, waiting for a Jersey interlocutor.

Also, I miss the bagels.

Bagels I could bring back with me, at least.

While I was up there, I also got to see snow, because Lord knows that wasn't an opportunity available down here this winter.

This looks weird - as though I'm hovering
in the air above the snow pack. I'm not.

I came back so soon because I had a baby shower to go to with Susie this morning. It was a very realistic baby shower, because the woman being feted was having her 6th baby, and most of us there had had at least 4 babies ourselves. So there were no how-to-raise-baby books or outfits that would not come off easily in the case of a diaper explosion. And our hostess outdid herself in the area of melon carving, I must say:

The pacifier just about killed me.

In other news, Brian received a college acceptance letter while I was away. Considering that the one other college he had applied to had already rejected him (and a POX on them, I say), "relief" doesn't even begin to describe how we all felt when we heard the news. We've got one very happy teen in the house, people, is what I'm trying to say. And Susie is thrilled that she can move into Brian's room come August (it's bigger than hers).

Which means, hey, I get Susie's old room for my yarn collections, only 5 months from now...and Larry won't mind getting the yarn dresser out of our bedroom, that's for sure. I guess Brian's going to wonder why we're all offering to help him pack, poor guy...