More and more each year, I find coming home for Thanksgiving to be a surreal experience. It occupies a strange space in my life: it's too short to get used to being at "home", but it's not like it's a vacation, since I'm spending it at the place I used to live. Instead, I get this strange impression that I've driven some untold hours through a portal into the past, and arrived in the life I lived up to four years ago.