Homesickness Part ?

I wrote about my most recent bout of homesickness a week or so ago. It’s not as intense as our November epidemic, but there have been several factors converging together these past few days. One is that we’re slightly bored. Since our holiday plans fell through, we’ve been here in a quiet Quito, not socializing much, mostly getting our entertainment from American media. Two nights ago, we watched Cold Mountain, which has some beautiful North American landscape shots, and plenty of North American “traditional music.” We also listened to an episode of “This American Life” yesterday, and today we listened to Saturday’s edition of “All Things Considered.” In fact, we subscribed to both “All Things Considered” and “This American Life” for a month through audible.com.

Additionally, we’ve been talking about future travel plans. Eileen has a substantial break at the end of March, during which time we may go to the Galapagos or Peru or Chile. Eileen may even make two trips during that period. Her friend Joni may be coming to visit then, and my brother and sister are talking about coming down sometime soon. Since Eileen has whipped through most of the books we brought back from the states last month, we’ve also been investigating some recent books that we could have people bring us when they came in March.

We’ve also got to book our flights home pretty soon. So yesterday, we were talking about our possible departure dates. I’m done in mid-July, a full two weeks before Eileen, so one possibility is for me to come home a week or so earlier than she does and begin moving into the house. This option would make August less hectic, and it would probably be better for our marriage not to be moving into a house in the August heat with school’s increasingly larger shadow looming overhead like a meteor.

We still have five and a half months here, so we’ll have to live “in the now” (man). But in June and July, it will be tough to be here entirely, just as last summer, we were already in Ecuador a month before we left.