I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

No matter where I am in the world, no matter what beautiful landscape I might find myself in, no matter what new experience I might be having, I feel the pull of home.

I don't mean home as in place. I mean home as in place. I mean home as in people. There are wonderful,

necessary, life-changing adventures to be had by traveling, and still we long to hold and hug

and kiss the people who aren't there with us on that trip.

On my last vacation, for example, I escaped the frigid Midwestern winter for sunny Miami,

and it was heavenly, good company and good food and warm sun on my skin. And yet,

and yet, I couldn't wait to hug not only my children, but also my dog. I know I'm not alone

in that feeling, that pull. Even when the sunset is beautiful

on the water, even when I'm eating something impossibly delicious, even when I'm exactly where I want

to be, part of me is back home, thinking of home. And by home, I mean family,

the people who are my place in the world. The speaker of today's poem knows that feeling well.

They are someplace far away, doing painstaking and awe-inspiring work,

the work of discovery. And yet, and yet, they're thinking of their beloved, of home.

Southern Constellations by Brandon Kilbourne.

Now, in the closing days, the quarry again stands silent.

Our tools largely packed away, as the fossils recovered over this past month, now sit within the kitchen tent, their jacketing plaster ghostly in its shade.

With the expedition nearly over, I take about an hour each evening to venture off from the others,

seizing these final chances and the absent risk of nightfall to quest for wildflow among the tundra's hollows, a souvenir from this land where the summer sun never sets.

Bare fingertips burning from the near August cold, I pluck stems of lemon cup poppies, collect white bells of heather, stash delicate globes of Campion, to press between waterproof pages, putting to use the field notebook that I have neglected to fill with my thoughts here on Ellesmere,

reflections on dwarf caribou, the lost histories lived out by fossil fish, and my fortune not to

happen upon a polar bear, all unrecorded, but leaving room instead,

...