IN WHICH WE HAVE RETURNED HOME FROM FOREIGN PARTS

"The summer that I turned twenty-four," it will say in the history books, "my parents took all of their children to England for two weeks." But things get left out of history books, so I feel the need to keep some records of my own.

What stands out in my rememberings on this, the second day back in Iowa, are these things:

The woods in the English countryside are dense, and the roads slip through them politely, not wanting to disturb the native greenery, carving out only as much space as is needed for the cars to pass through, sometimes barely enough. Things are old in England, and everyone lives with and uses the old things, but not so much because they revere the old - just that they've always been cohabiting with the oldness and there doesn't seem to be any reason to push out a roommate who has been minding his own business for hundreds of years and keeping the rain out just fine, thank you very much.

And then London, where you mostly walk around inside the 21st century but the 15th century pops in for a visit every few blocks, and underneath it all there is a parallel world called the tube that is a law unto itself.

At some moments England didn't feel very foreign - people, cars, trees, grocery stores - nothing unusual. When you ask for a band-aid and then have to explain that what you want is a small adhesive bandage and learn that what you're looking for is a plaster, then it seems that you've emerged by accident into some near-miss version of the real world. The road signs gently ask you to "give way" instead of commanding you to "yield!" but somehow that gentleness fails to offer the guiding presence you've come to expect from road signs, and you find yourself wishing that whoever made the signs wouldn't have assumed (wrongly) that you need only gentle nudges to reach your destination, and would instead treat you like the incompetent fool that American highway engineers intuitively know you are. 

We only explored a patch of the bottom third of the country, and we focused our time particularly in London, so I think it's disingenuous to think that we've seen England. We saw some of it, at least, and I understand now why the English write about the world in the way they do. The world feels a certain way over there - old, small, interconnected and leisurely, unless you're in London, which might be its own universe.

I can't explain why being home now is so good. I felt when I was there that I could have lived happily to the end of days in a tiny English village, but Iowa feels more like home than it ever has after our sojourns on the other side of an ocean. My old house is young in the eyes of the ancient buildings we've now seen, and it knows me in a way that those stone giants never could. I loved that world, but I didn't belong there.

And now again we have yield signs and band-aids. Simple comforts.