(Written last night after the Rosie Thomas and Denison Witmer concert at Jammin' Java in Vienna, VA near DC.)

I haven't really started to say goodbye to much of my hometown crowd yet, because it seems like leaving is still so far away, when really it's only a month and a half.. and less every day.

But tonight, when I was saying goodbye to the staff at Jammin' Java, I felt like it was forever, and I nearly cried the way that we all cried when we were ending a school year and we were getting read to part with out every-weekday-friends for a Whole Summer, ad we knew in our adolescent-and-teen wisdom that even though we'd see them again soon enough, the we and the them would be different people, because summers have a way of changing us more and also of making the changes more noticible because of the lack of gradually observing the changes that take place during the other 9-and-a-half to ten months of teh year.

And so I said goodbye to them, knowing that even if it wasn't goodbye forever, there was a me (or a part of me) that would never be back there again, maybe also parts of them that the me that does return would never see again, either.

So I probably will be back, but I will have changed in the meantime. And that's certainly not a bad thing .. Lord knows we're all in desperate need of change. But saying goodbye to them tonight was also saying goodbye, on some level, to whatever me will not return, to whatever them will not be there when I return. Bittersweet, really, in its mixed excitement, potentially short time frame, and potentially large changes.

Also, it was the first real goodbye, and when I do come back it will just be visiting, and not living a mere 200ish miles away, mere three hour trek from my door to theirs. And there are many more goodbyes, many much more serious and final goodbyes, that will be taking place over the next 7 weeks. It wasn't until this night that I really realized that I was saying goodbye, for the first real time in 5 years. I had known it, of course.I had felt part of it when I was planning to move to NC, and (oddly enough), the change-taking-place aspect when I was preparing to visit FL over the holidays. But it wasn't until tonight that the finality of my leaving set in. This place that has been a home-away-from-home for 4 years won't be anymore, unless I end up stationed nearby; And saying goodbye there wasn't far off from saying goodbye here.