Blog disowning me

Hello! I am hardly here! It is a pocket of the world that I have abandoned, yet I return to it every so often. What has happened? This time last year I was probably sitting on the port of Piraeus dreaming of fiction and the insane color of the Aegean sea. It was probably the farthest away I've ever felt. But this year I am in Pittsburgh, happily teaching and cycling and reading, and I'm not returning to California in a long time. This summer I was in Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, where I found my long-lost little sister, Melissa. We were both only children who have decided to change the course of our fates. I also met some other wonderful poets. It doesn't stop does it?

I visited Boston again for the first time in ten years. I missed that place so much--I will always associate it with wonder and childhood and the first glimpses into imagination and adventure and friendship. I stayed with Jill, who lives in Brookline only a few blocks away from my old apartment! Halle's Sanctuary, the park I used to go to as a child (I called the tiny trail "The Adventure"), has now expanded into a beautiful golden marsh and I felt like I was returning to that world...As a child I found a path into an amazing flower garden I called "The Secret Garden" - and it was still there! Just that magic made me so nostalgic and I want to visit Boston again....

When I returned to the Bay, I went to San Francisco a couple of times with Melissa--we went to the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, in the City Lights area and Chinatown. Annika also visited me and we went twice into the city, wandering everywhere from Mission District to Castro to Japantown...We stopped at several guitar shops, sang in the park, visited 826 Valencia. San Francisco is probably my favorite city in California and surely one of my favorite places in the world.