Discovering The Depot is one of the best things that's happened to me since moving to Hattiesburg, and it was a total accident. The coffee is great, the staff wonderful, and they do have biscuits that are "too good for this world" as Rick Bragg said of the biscuits from his Appalachian upbringing--I'm sure he'd say the ones here don't compare, and they probably don't. Nonetheless, I've never eaten a biscuit from Appalachia, so until I do, these will more than suffice.

It's good to be home, and I can't shake that good feeling even a week and a half after coming back. I am obsessed and in love with familiarity, but I am certain that I could find the very same thing just about anywhere in the world if I stuck around long enough. Sao Paulo would be tough. The city is loud and moving all of the time. There's little in the way of silence and solitude. I cannot imagine what it must be like to live in a place like China, even more populated and busy. More than ever, though, I realize how important it is for me to learn another language and to be able to speak that language with another person. I know how much of a gift language is, whether on the page or from the mouth, and I want to be able to share the life with people through that medium. I do not know what the good Lord will do with these feelings of mine, about the language--what they will mean and how they will pan out--I only know that I care, and that I rarely let go of anything that I care even a little about.

It's summer and I haven't been swimming. I need to get on that, but without fail, whenever I swim in a public pool it seems like I come out with a sinus infection. I got a sinus infection while I was in Brazil, but I managed. It was one of my great fears to get sick away from home, away from the familiar, but it was all right. I got home. I didn't die. Another worry conquered. I'm waiting for the day when I don't worry at all.

What I wouldn't give.