Transatlanticism reminds me of being in Minneapolis almost a month ago, at that crazy house party, of meeting Betsy and draining those kegs on the cold back porch.

We drove all day and night, from Raleigh, to arrive here in Iowa City at seven this morning, so I could collapse into a deep sleep on Jill's futon.

It's good to be home again, or at least something close to home. I can now take in the weather, finally chilly and gray, a sunless pall over startlingly denuded trees, when yesterday was all Carolina green and Kentucky blue. We left a southern place in 80-degree weather and arrived in our beautifully barren stomping ground a few latitudes north, greeted by the downtown Friday, the pretty Iowa City girls walking to class along the cold slope of October's last afternoon.

What a way to spend my favorite month, sprawled out across a great eastern chunk of a country I love more now, pounding four thousand miles into that old faithful van, leaving calling cards in every city, embracing old friends in impossibly quick succession. There's something grand and expansive in the year's last quarter, and you can hear it in certain music, the long fugues, the incongruity of interstate travel.

Tomorrow I'll finally make it back to Grinnell and, in an All Saints' Day tradition I've kept for years, change the sheets on my bed to flannel.

Bundle up. I love it.

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