I have been home for a little more than a week and it is about to be a new year.

Coming home has been an adjustment but it is nice to be back in America and feel like I truly belong again. Now I understand the word homeland. On Christmas Eve I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay in my bed, wide awake, feeling uneasy—like there was something I was forgetting. I got up, went downstairs, double checked that I had locked the door, poured myself a glass of water, and got back into bed: I still couldn't fall asleep. Everything was quiet both inside and outside the house. It seemed to me like I must have been the only person on my street awake. Then I realized that’s exactly what was wrong—- the quiet! After four months of falling asleep in Barcelona listening to dogs bark, drunks laugh, and my host mother’s sleeping-pill-induced snores, the true and perfect silence of two A.M. on a sleepy little Delaware street was eerie. When I arrived in Barcelona I used to put in ear plugs when I read; now I saw silence differently—as a morbid vacuum where noise should have been—and it creeped me out.

Provincial life does have its advantages, however. For one, it is beautiful. I missed nature while I was abroad. I went for a bike ride with my father the other day and it blew me away. I had forgotten how picturesque the area where I’m from is. It was as though I was pedaling through a Wyeth painting filled with gently rolling hills, barren of their wheat in the wintertime, and little gurgling creeks, still rimmed with early morning ice that the sun was busy thawing away. We rode past deer, squirrels and chipmunks, red tailed hawks, turkey vultures, and plenty of geese. Beyond the wooden fences lining the narrow back roads, horses with thermal blankets covering their flanks stood outside old stone farmhouses stomping and shaking off the cold; sheep grazed languidly on the thin grass that sprouted through farm ponds' muddy banks. And then, of course, there were the neighbors out walking their decidedly American dogs: happy Labradors and energetic golden retrievers with owners who said hello, wished you a happy new year, and smiled. We even biked past an elderly couple who had hitched up their ponies to a little covered wagon and were out for a ride in the brisk mid-morning air. They waved the most enthusiastically of them all.

But it wasn’t until today, shooting sporting clays with special edition red, white, and blue colored shotgun shells, that I was irrevocably convinced that my time in Barcelona is truly over and gone: tonight, when December ends and the fireworks go off, I’m going to pretend it's the fourth of July.