Welcome

This serves as both a welcome to my blog and my first posting, about welcomes. Neat, huh.

My first welcome came even before I reached Korea in the Vancouver airport where, having helped a woman make a call and given her the extra change she needed for it, I was (after a little small talk in limited English) invited to visit her home sometime.

My second was from the protective older woman who sat next to me on the airplane and patiently listened to me read the Korean alphabet and taught me fascinating alternate meanings of words. I told her she was my first Korean teacher. As we left the plane, she gave me her cell phone number in case I needed anything or got in trouble.

My official welcomer to my new job was Willie, my direct supervisor and email correspondent these past weeks. He was as charming in person as he had been over email, and only his gender took me by surprise. I had assumed him to be female from the profusion of smiley faces and cheerful exclamations in his messages.

In my new apartment, I was welcomed by whoever had thoughtfully left behind a coffee maker, a pen collection, dish soap, a profusion of clothes hangers.

My favorite welcome, though, was the next day as I wandered dazed and a little forlorn into a wide abandoned lot grown thick with weeds and wildflowers. The cosmos, the familiar grasses and weeds whose names I didn't know but whom I had been neighborly with my whole life were a powerful comfort. As I picked my way among mud puddles and startled pigeons in unfamiliar bronze plumage, I began to feel a little bit at home.