I'm home again and it's snowing which is fine with me. If I'm going to be in a cold state for the winter, better white than brown. I got a chance to refill the compost heap with bags of leaves that Sugar collected for me and he was able to finish the last bit of our new flagstone walkway before the weather changed.

My trip home on Amtrak was likely my last since they changed the connection point a few hours further down the line. The conversation on this trip was especially notable for me. I talked to 2 different parents who had lost a child, two widows who had lost spouses, a Katrina 'displaced person' and a young man who had just been released from prison after 12 years. The latter made the biggest impression on me. I saw him board at the Flagstaff bus station during the 8 hour connection ride from Albuquerque to Denver. The uniformed escorts didn't have guns, still I wondered if he was going to try to take us a hostages. At a snack stop before Raton, he originated to me that he had just been released and this was his first look at the outside since he was 17 years old. He was delighted to be able to open doors for himself. He was anxious about how his mom would accept him, hoping she would still consider him her little boy. I could tell he was nervous just being outside. When the bus broke down from an oil leak, I met the blind woman who needed to use my cell phone to call her children to come get her. Amazingly, she had to spend some time talking them into coming.

The last two months have shown me a gratifying expanse of humanity and now I'm back in Boulder with the 'most diverse bunch of middle class white people' you'll ever see. The struggles here are mostly internal.