Within the few dozen words of a seemingly insignificant email, I notified my landlord in Paris of my intention to move out.
Although the message was small, it felt like its ramifications would be enormous. There was no turning back. The comfortable rhythm I had forged and maintained over the past 6 years in the city of lights was broken. For better or for worse, I had finally taken a small but indelible step in the direction of Florida, the Space Shuttle and meeting Jonathan Harris.
Driving with my mother in the afternoon, we decided to take tour past the old workplace of my father. Coming to a stop in front of the building where he had his office, we discovered that it had been recently taken over by NASA.
Disbelieving, I peered through the windows to see that indeed, the displays of old sawmills and the yellowing photos of pioneering foresters had been replaced by posters of astronauts making spacewalks and NASA's famous blue marble.
Maybe it's normal that NASA has offices in small towns in the far flung corners of the world, but the fact that they wound up in this particular building at this particular time somehow made me feel slightly less nauseous about the long road that seems to lie ahead.
