"come join the youth and beauty brigade"

I suppose a person can be stricken with nostalgia over anything, in the end. Sometimes, when I look at the MSU bell-tower, little used and graven with words like "love," "peace," and so on -- these never fail to remind me of the four ministries of 1984, like the Ministry of Peace (Miniwar) -- or see the jagged winter shadows slathered across the single street of campus, I sometimes miss the old worm-ridden place.

I was miserable there, you know. The classes were no different than my high school's, and the people acted much the same. I drove home every Friday, in the very late afternoon, and returned from home around the same time, to dilly-dally in my tiny room with my reticent roommate taking space before his computer. Sometimes I miss those drives, the familiar road that I can still navigate, years after transferring, better than any route in Richmond.

And all because it was long ago, I sometimes think. We can miss a great deal, us silly little humans, bags of meat and synapse, if we put enough temporal distance between us.

I guess I'm writing this because I'm not looking forward to moving into my small little flat, away from campus and its illusions of life and light. I see water-stained browns and light-crushing dim off-whites when I think of the apartment, and I'm surprised every time I go in it and see the fresh white paint. More than the place I'm going to, where I'm leaving is what's important here. I really do like my home, here, closed in by hills and the warped mass of trees grown large on the swells of hill and, if you'll pardon the humor, dell. I tend to miss the walks along the road, peering at rock-sunning lizards, deer in the evenings, and the shattered remnants of stray dogs that limn the road every summer, a swelter of hot stink in June and a crumbled, scattered mass of bone in August. I like pressing beyond each turning of the road and enjoying each vista of distant neighbors and river current as they open up.

I like the quiet, and the distance that allows me to be as loud as I'd like, at almost any time of day or night. There's a power in wild blackberry bushes; they grow over our rotting, out-of-use coal pile, sitll slathered with shards of black, under the mass of growth.

Even the figure of my younger cousin, invariably white-shirted in summer, mowing everyone's yard (family's, actually, but that's just about everyone in sight here) under his straw hat, amuses me. He's twenty-one (I'm shocked to find), and still doesn't have a driver's license, as his parents worry over the insurance costs. At least, that's what they say. I never take advantage of it, but I could probably show up in the evening, every so often, and they'd feed me.

I'm wistful as my break -- possibly my last scholastic summer holiday -- winds toward its death, and I suppose this is a love letter to it, and my home, and the rolling days of summer. I never really see anyone in the summer; it stretches, usually, as a mass of lonesome days, my parents leaving around noon, and then the day's all mine. I write, poke around the internet, and take up whatever project I find myself intrigued by. Last year, about this time, I was carving a gandr and wrapping it in green runes. This year I've been knitting. Both summers I've spent a little time cataloguing books -- more last summer than this, though. I read, obviously, and watch a little television. I sit through weather, every year, until that same moment in July when I turn the air conditioner on of my own volition, the air of the house wheezing and gasping under the heat of poor ventilation.

After a few weeks, like every year, I'll begin to enjoy my schooling again. I'll probably acclimate to whatever rigours this new job has for me, hack out a sleeping schedule that keeps me alive, and in short, deal. But for now this is my tiny little tower-top of ivory and bone, wavering against the pressing tides down below. It still offers a spectacular view, I must say.