Alexandra Robinette:  

I'm home! Well, sort of. You know, some people take to the expatriate lifestyle with gusto.They find another country & settle in. Or they travel from place to place, footloose & fancy free, & absorb the 'exotic'. I enjoyed living in England & traveling around Europe & North Africa. It was thrilling to be surrounded by history, to stumble over the stones of a Roman road on the Yorkshire moors, to stand amidst the menhirs of a Bronze Age stone circle on misty & windswept hill, to have tea where Beau Brummel & the Duchess of Devonshire dined, to waltz across the Piazza San Marco at 4am in the midst of Carnivale... but I was always homesick for America & Americans, mostly just a little, sometimes a lot. Late in 2001, I finally sold my 1850s cottage on the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, a beautiful rural county in England, & made my way back, across the surface of the planet (5 wks total, much of it on a bulk freighter) to Gulfport, MS (before Katrina -- everything I came to know there is gone now, swept away on that terrific storm surge). Having wintered 2001-02 (& then some) in Mississippi on the Gulf Coast, enjoying the comparatively mild climate at that time of year, as the tempera...Expand for more