Christmas time's a comin'

So here I am, sitting on a bed in my parents' house in Cookeville, in a room that never was my bedroom (it alternated between Trey and Aaron--my bedroom is now a storage room) but might as well have been, listening to familiar traffic sounds and my parents puttering downstairs. I'm back in Tennessee for a couple of weeks for the holidays. It occurs to me that this will be the longest stretch of time I've actually stayed in the ancestral Piepmeier home since I left for graduate school almost eleven years ago.

In some ways, eleven years doesn't change a lot in the Piepmeier household--the stuff just accrues. I'm sitting here looking at the box that one of my brothers' Windows 95 came in, for instance, as well as a small framed portrait of Goofy that I believe was mine when I was five or six. T-shirts from every community theater performance Aaron was ever in fill the closet. We Piepmeiers are a packratty bunch.

But loads of things have changed, of course, in the last eleven years and in the last six months. And I'm sitting here feeling like a composite of all the people I've been. At the moment it feels nice--I feel like I'm at such a good place in my life that I'm not struggling against the gravitational pull of this house. I'm settling in for the next little while.