And so here I am, wrapped in my old red bathrobe, snugged into my corner of the grey couch, drinking black coffee from a white cup and saucer, as if I've never left home. I last sat here nine days ago, and I'm very glad to be back, and to have no place to go.

Outside the weather has shifted, the strange warmness of the past week replaced by a cold wind. Most of the leaves are down now. The windows are shut tight and the furnace grumbles and the color of the sky whispers November, November, November. Compared to Brooklyn, the neighborhood is bucolic. Compared to Monson and West Tremont, it is an urban cluster. I feel disoriented, having leaped back and forth amid so much geographic disparity. Still everywhere I was, I thought, How amazing this is. I kept being surprised by place, and then the people in the place. The only arty thing I did was my own reading and teaching. Everything else was people--many of them friends I've known for decades, others met only recently, but all the ballast of my trip. Some are writers; some don't write at all. Some share the mixed-up romantic-dramatic history of people who meet when they are young; some have led entirely separate physical lives from me. I saw my son continue to intertwine with many of these friends, both as he is now and as he was in their memories of his childhood. These relationships are complicated and rich and elegiac and comical, and they remind me that getting older is not only loss. It is also a kind of glorious party.