Waves

I'm finding that emotion comes in waves for me these days. Crashing and thunderous. Like the waves at high tide.

Sometimes I get welled up just seeing the beauty of the sun sparkling across the blue colored Yellow Sea. It's there again when I see the full display of fall colors against the backdrop of our limestone Laoshans.

This is the last season, for a long time (maybe ever), that I'll rise to the sound of the putting engine of an old wooden junk, motoring out for the morning catch; or the scratching sound of the simplest of brooms sweeping the sidewalk clear, before the morning rush of people will litter it again.

In momentary glimpses, I see the world around me differently. These sights, which threatened, during the longest days of expat experience, to become mundane, I am once again acutely aware of.

Listening to each syllable of a language that does not roll easily off my own tongue.

Noting each face.

Locking away in my mind the images.

The woman from the countryside sitting idly in the sunshine, the padded baby, sitting in her lap in quilted split crotch trousers and tugging at his momma's sweater for a drink.

A lorry laden with sweet potatoes, covered with homemade quilts to prevent distruction by frost, swaddled to prevent bruising.

Each image and sound byte tugs romanitcally at my heartstrings ... as if I am experiencing it for the first time. This wistful feeling rises and swells. Crests and crashes. And is whisked out to sea.