Arriving to a Frosting Winter

As I walked down the aisle of the getting-off-plane tunnel, the first winter breeze hit me chillingly. I believe it was around only 26F outside temperature, and I hadn't been in such a cold winter for a long, long time. Last time I paid a visit to "home, Seattle," was in winter 2007. That was one whole year ago.

I popped in the same old car of dad's, and its scent was more than familiar, except I knew that this time I was heading towards a new home, a new house I've never visited before, but that they had been residing in for half a year already. All of a sudden, this mixture of returning home yet arriving in an unknown place hit me like a fuse of nostalgic complex. Maybe I don't know who I am, or maybe I don't know where I belong.

Sometimes I feel like I travel too much, move too much, and change addresses so often that friends find it totally not surprised to learn that I could be suddenly in a very distant, exotic city. And they would easily start a warm-up conversation with, "Where are you right now?" And by where, they are asking me to name the city's name.

It is interesting how, from my travel between cities, countries, and continents, I often switch from a season to another. In Taipei it is still winter, but the weather has merely gone down for the past few days and reached a chillness only enough to start putting on light sweaters and decorating scarves. In Seattle, it has been snowing on and off, and you never know when you'll get a chance to mow the frosting lawn.

And that is how the weather was when I landed in the city. In between controversial attitudes, I was either traveling from home to tour, from tour to home, from hostel to hostel, or from winter of a kind to another kind of winter.