When I was in seventh grade, my homeroom teacher who was a new young teacher and did not command much respect from us, read us a poem everyday. I was not into poetry then but one poem he read stuck with me all these years. It was a poem by Robert Frost about someone who comes to the fork in the road and a spends a good while there trying to decide which road to take. The last three lines go:

Two roads diverged in a wood
and I… I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference

After writing my last trip log yesterday, I read a short email from my friend Allan which included the following update on his boys: "David (2) is now walking around the house. Bruce (also 2) can put wooden train tracks together and counts down for "blast off." Paul (4) arranges colored plastic cups in the right order to show stellar evolution, and draws galaxies."

I've seen the sun set over the Mekong river, heard a beautiful old Italian love song as it was sung across an empty Venice plaza, hiked up a peak in the Himalayas, swam through a school of barracuda.... but nothing I seen, heard or done compares with the experience Margaret and Allan have every day watching their children grow up. I miss playing with Allan's boys. I miss my students. I miss my friends. And for the first time, I am homesick and thinking that maybe this six months of my life has been a waste, that maybe much of this life has been a waste, that maybe there is a reason a road is less traveled by.

Still traveling, but looking for alternative routes.