This past week I spent mostly at my friend's organic farm about an hour and a half outside the city. There the heat is more fun and bearable than in the city - until the power goes off and there are no fans to move the air around and the mosquitoes begin to swarm. I love it there. It has some of the things I desperately miss: a kitchen, friends, fresh air, quiet. The days fly by and melt into each other out on the farm. It also has a lot of the things I will miss when I am back in the States soon: Gujarati, my Indian friends, banana and papaya trees, buffalo and goats, amazing birds, camels and elephants to do the landscaping, so many things. There are a million things about India that fascinate me, that keep my curiosity and imagination peaked all the time.

I've begun to dismantle my room, to give stuff away and plan what is to be sent. Taking things off the wall and emptying bookshelves has suddenly shifted me into moving mode, and in a matter of hours I felt I already had one foot out the door.

I'm a little nervous about going home. There is so much ahead of me: writing a dissertation, facing a changed committee, finding a new apartment, perhaps facing no prospect of work in the coming year in my department. I'm dying to be there, and yet I am scared of forgetting some of what I have seen and learned here, and I am a little nervous about the challenges and unknowns I face once I get home.