Hemingway & Herriot

Lily Elizabeth

This is right around the time I start getting nervous. About a week out and “oh my gosh, I’m going!” turns suddenly into “oh god, I’m actually going…” Don’t get me wrong; I’m so psyched to leave, but I think it’s unrealistic to avoid the flipside of the excitement that wraps around travel – the monstrous apprehension that resides in the knowledge that you’re leaving everything you know.

I’m just a kid from Middletown, Delaware. Unless you’re from there, I doubt that you know where it is. It’s okay – I’m not offended. Nobody does. I loved growing up here; some of my happiest memories are etched into the cracking streets of this town now buried gently under the new roads and housing developments inching out like spilled ink.

Something else you should know about Delaware: it’s flat. Completely flat. And while, as of late, I’m living for the Red Hills of my new home in Georgia, there is something that you learn to appreciate when the land around you goes on and on for miles until you can nearly see your house from wherever you are. You learn to daydream about running until there isn’t anything left – until you reach the horizon, or at least make it back to where you started. You imagine what it would be like to get on a plane and go as far forward as you possibly can. And you start to feel like the rest of the world is a lot closer than perhaps it is.

I couldn’t get to the other side of the world until I was 21, but, lucky for me, seeing Paris for the first time was an Ella Fitzgerald-level falling in love. To be sure, the first time I was in love I was lucky enough to fall for the streets of Paris – hazy, crowded and complete perfection (the on-street Porta-Johns, perhaps not so much, but I digress).

Anyway, I was sold like a lovesick schoolboy. The world is so tiny and so old and so finite, and I was getting to see it. I should probably learn to be a more exciting tourist, but in any place I’ve visited, some of my favorite memories have been sitting with a cup of coffee (or tea or Guinness, you pick) and just breathing. Just watching. Just appreciating that I am out of my comfort zone and still okay.

So, yes, in about a week I’ll be packing up my bags full of long pants and mosquito repellent and heading to India with a few of my classmates and professors to experience veterinary medicine there. I can’t say it’s a dream come true because, honestly, I never really expected I’d get there. But I’m learning to not say no – to stop setting my own limitations and boundaries. To start being the person again who looks out at the horizon and tells herself that anywhere she wants to go is not so far away. And that all she has to do to step onto the road.

And you’re all welcome to join.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

~ LOTR