Tonight I watched Hotel Rwanda again while stuffing envelopes with support letters for the May Congo trip. On the letters are pictures—of Asha, of her baby Faida, of Bishop. Sometimes I feel such a weight, such a weight, like I came back from Congo a hundred pounds heavier. The knowledge of them and what they’ve lived through and what they’re still living through can be hard to carry around. I email Bishop and Fiston on a somewhat regular basis, telling them I’m coming back. Right now, I’m listening to a CD I bought in a Bukavu music shop, a tiny room whose walls were plastered with pictures of musicians, a black boom box with bad speakers belting out music in a language I couldn’t understand. The sounds of Bukavu—the music, always piped through bad speakers, unless played live; the lovely clinking of bottles as men carrying sodas in tin buckets on their heads advertised their goods by running metal bottle openers against the glass bottles. People, and cars, and chickens, and motorcycles.

I’d watched Hotel Rwanda before the trip last year, but this was the first time I’d seen it since. It was a shock in the beginning to realize I recognized things. I couldn’t pick out or label any building except the airport, but it was immediately familiar to me. When we landed in Kigali and drove out of the city and toward the border, it had seemed entirely and utterly foreign, as if I had walked off an airplane and onto another planet. But now, having seen parts of that city, having passed through those streets, the sights seem familiar. I wonder what it will feel like to be there again. To walk across that border.

Before I went to Congo last year, my parents worried over our itinerary, which had us spending the night in a Rwanda border town. They knew about the genocide—by now, pretty much everyone knows at least a little about the genocide. What many fewer people know is that when the architects of the genocide fled the country, they fled into Congo. Set up camp. Reorganized. There’s a line at the end of Hotel Rwanda, just before the credits roll, that references this, a line of text about Congo. When I saw that line, I thought, And so it begins. How strange to think as one story wraps up, another begins. Or maybe the story never ends, it just relocates.

But the funny thing is, for all my parents’ concern, Rwanda has done spectacularly well, all things considered. I’d vacation there. Lots of people do just that. You’d never guess something so ghastly could happen in a place so beautiful; that’s what was running through my head as we drove on fairly good roads from the capital to the border. The closer we got to Congo, though, the worse the roads became.

Rwanda gives me hope for Congo, to see how far a place can come, to see what odds can be surmounted. Maybe one day, we’ll see a movie about Congo, and we’ll say, can you believe that happened there? Can you believe the country was once in ruins? And that, I know, will be a wonderful day.

Lately, instead of renting movies we’ve been watching ones we own and haven’t seen in a while (imagine that). Last night, we cracked out Apollo 13, and I must say, even though I’ve seen it probably about a dozen times—my parents bought it on VHS, and I was an only child, so I tended to watch and re-watch every movie we owned—I still think it’s a great movie. But what it really made me think about last night was Florida.

Recently, I’ve been downright homesick. Though, to be fair, I’m not sure whether I’m homesick for the actual place or for my childhood. The two are inextricable.

There were the space-themed exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum in DC, the lunar module and rover, the paintings of the lunar landings. There’s the talk of Marvin and Amie maybe visiting Florida next year to see a launch. And just today, I thought—homemade lemonade. How I would love to have some homemade lemonade.

So, the things I took for granted, growing up in Florida:

1. Launches. Rockets, space shuttles. We’d watch the countdown on TV and then if it was really going, we’d run outside to the front yard to watch. And there it would be, a big plume and a glowing ball at the top, rising above our house. I’d stand smack in the middle of our street and look up, and I can still feel the warm asphalt on my bare feet. I can still hear the rumble of the launches, the deep, almost crunchy sound. I remember waking up to that sound, the windows rattling, terrified for a split second, thinking we were having an earthquake or something, before realizing it was just a shuttle launch and going back to bed.

2. All the space stuff. I didn’t realize it was special to grow up a few miles from Kennedy Space Center. Space was so normal to us. Everybody’s dad worked at KSC or at Cape Canaveral. Our next-door neighbor was a retired NASA engineer; he helped me with math. My first official date with Jesse was to the KSC visitor’s center, and our first kiss was beneath a bright orange shuttle external tank. One of Jesse’s dad’s friends was an astronaut, and we got free tickets to see an IMAX movie he’d helped film at the International Space Station.

3. Fresh fruit. Dad’s thumb has always been impossibly green (I got my mom’s hands), so in our backyard we had quite the collection of fruit trees—oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes, tangelos, starfruit. Bananas for a while, though I believe they were killed in one of our rare deep freezes. My childhood winters were full of oranges, the sounds of my mom making orange juice in the kitchen, picking bags of them to give away when someone visited from out of state. And when I was sick, Dad would make me limeade or lemonade, sometimes ice cold, sometimes heated up if I had a sore throat. The fruit I can get at Harris Teeter tastes nothing like the fruit that came out of our backyard.

4. All things tropical. I didn’t think I’d miss palm trees and the ability to take a day trip to Miami, but I do. I miss the colors of Florida, its neons, its flamingo pinks. I miss how gaudy it could be, how bright the sun was.

5. Theme parks. There, I said it. I miss Disney. I miss how just about every billboard advertised some new ride or attraction, how everything was geared toward tourists, how it felt like a perpetual vacation. When I lived in Orlando, I loved to roll my eyes at the constant barrage of theme park ads, but now I miss them. And though I was often bored, there was the sense that I never really had to be. There was always something wanting to entertain me.

There was just something fundamentally exciting about Florida, something I didn’t appreciate until leaving. The space stuff, being so close to something that represents what we can do with enough determination and brainpower and creativity. And all the rest, the excess of family fun and a growing season that never stopped, there is something wonderful about having grown up in such a place.