I Didn't Take Pictures When I Lived There

But I make up for it when I return. It's the years in the wilderness, the suburban wilderness. They have softened me, I suppose, turned me into a tourist. I snap and snap and don't care if people think I'm a tourist. I'm easily impressed. I look up.

Every direction is a photograph. The ripple of water in a lagoon, the play of light on a brownstone, the San Remo glimpsed through a screen of bright willow green.

Maybe we should move back to New York, I say to Tom, knowing, before the words leave my mouth, how foolish they sound, the four-bedroom colonial back in Virginia filled to bursting. Knowing that life has taken me far from the person I was when I made my way in Manhattan years ago.

But that's the point of travel. Possibilities present themselves. Life, in all its fullness, returns.