Cross-posted from No Depression.
As many chose to do, we spent a few hours of our holiday season sequestered in a warm, dark place, surrounded by friends and family, watching James Cameron’s $250-million epic film, Avatar, though not in 3D.
Absent that night, though she has been around us much these last few months, is a young friend and sometime employee, now in her early 30s and just returned from three years with the Peace Corps in Africa.
She is one who belongs, to borrow from Robert Service, to "...the race of men who won’t fit in/A race that can’t stay still/So they break the hearts of kith and kin/and roam the world at will." At the end of each journey she returns to her college job because we will always welcome her back and because she needs sometimes – especially this time, after three years living in a very different place, with very different rules – to be around people who understand her need to reimmerse herself in our society.