I am stuck in Cambridge, where under ideal conditions, I should be intently working on my thesis.

Less than fifteen days from now I have to turn in a paper that is supposed to be the pinnacle of my academic career (hah!). Sixteen days from now, I have to start looking for something to occupy my time and justify (support?) my independent existence for at least a year after the college lets me go and another body of higher education lets me in. A little over two months from now I will be marching to that heartbreaking song that will take me once again, as it did four years ago, away from my friends, the people that I love and the home that I've come to know. Somewhere between the time my grandfather held me up in the air (I was two or three, my earliest memory) and today (no grandfather, ass-on-chair in front of a computer), on one side of the Pacific and one side of the Atlantic, my life happened. Twenty-one years, and disconcertingly, still going.

At 21 my grandfather got married. In a year his first-born son died. More children. The War.
Even more children. A dream home. The death of a sister. A high position in the government. Weddings. The death of another son. Children leaving. Grandchildren. Retirement. Gardening. That day, when I gained consciousness of myself in time, I was in full view of a giant: my grandfather in his 60s. He was successful, he was happy, he made people happy. He filled my piggy-bank with coins, my head with stories and my heart with love.

All of my young life I thought of my grandfather as no more than a gardener. That was how he spent his time and that garden was my world. I caught spiders and ladybugs. We had beautiful orchids and ceramic gnomes. We even swam in the garden pond full of blue and gold fish. If I had known then the majesty of a life well-lived, if I had known about the hard work that led up to and went into keeping a simple, steady life, where one could spend the day cultivating one's own garden, I would have trembled in my grandfather's presence. I would have never learned how to laugh or smile. I would have spent my life terrified of time, of the work that it makes you do, of the places that it takes you to and the burden it imposes on you.

I know I would have, because I am now.