Most of the time, it's easy to hold homesickness at bay. Watch LOST, surf the Internets, play with the cats, worry about the job, basically just distract myself. But more and more these days, I find it catching me off-guard, in unexpected ways:
Getting emails from the IU-SLIS listserv, reminding me of upcoming events. Oh wait! I'm not a student anymore, I don't go to IU. And then I am hit by a dozen memories of the campus, my initial starry-eyed wonder of the architecture, the seasons, the small-town feel.

Listening to some of my New Age music on my Itunes. Dead Can Dance, or Loreena McKennitt especially. All of a sudden I am transported back to my first semester: autumn and winter evenings at the Fountain Park apartment, as I sat at my computer, editing articles for the JCMC and caught up in the intensity of the music, as the temperature dropped outside, and inside, all was a cozy cocoon of Michael and music and me and work.
Looking at pictures on Flikr. Just random peoples' pictures...sometimes the scenery will be so obviously autumn or winter--the sky just looks cold, and you can tell it's chilly, and I begin to miss the idea of seasons so tremendously. Most recently I saw a picture of a blue sky that had some grey, stormy clouds, and I remembered last October, the Saturday that Eric and I spent in Indy, touring bungalows and hanging out at one of the parks. The sky was similar--a chilly blue, but littered with grey clouds and late afternoon sunlight filtering through and made the clouds look even stormier. And I swung on the swings, and thought, Years from now I am going to take my children here, and they'll swing on the swings and they'll be so lucky to have seasons, even if they don't know it. I was SO CERTAIN that that would be my future. The autumn afternoon, and the certainty (no matter how delusional)--I miss them both.

It's time to go back to distracting myself. I don't want to look back too much. Otherwise I will miss whatever is going on right under my nose. And I am here now, here in Southern California. This is what matters.