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August 20, 1997 Rain. It rained all day, gloriously dense curtains of water streaming from the sky. The air was filled with that damp smell, that water smell on grass and leaves which makes me think of fall. There's still close to a month before the autumnal equinox, yet there is already that feeling in the air, that edge of chill creeping in under the heat. The air is lightening, becoming more crisp, less smudged. And that smell ... it makes me think of going back to school. The sales have already started and the school supplies are stacking up in the stores. I can see the gleaming piles of new pencils, the trim edges of the notepads and my heart gives a funny little jumping sigh at the sight. I want to be out there purchasing my supplies for the year, stacking up notebooks and pencils, paper clips and other sundries. Reveling in the smell of paper goods. That sense of back-to-school excitement keeps hovering around me, yet I know that this year, like last fall, I won't be going back. Somehow it's hitting harder this year though. Probably because I have been so badly disillusioned by the after-college, out and about Real World. Yes, I want to go back to school. I want to be picking out classes and scoping out textbooks, I want to be buying new jeans and sweatshirts and writing to all of my friends in anticipation of seeing them in the dorms in a few weeks. I had way too much fun in college, all things considered. And OH do I miss it. I miss that glorious periwinkle sky at Smith, contrasting with the Massachusetts leaves and the copper trimmings on the roofs and the red brick buildings. *SIGH* I loved college. I was addicted to all of its sights and smells and even its frustrations. I'm haunted by the spectre of my first week at school way back in 1992. My mother and I sat in crowded auditorium, sweating in the late summer heat. We were listening to the dean welcoming us to the school. I was looking forward to joining choruses and taking art and language classes. I had nowhere to look but forward. I'd met my roommate, we'd been moving stuff in almost all afternoon. I laughed to find out that one of the school songs was the same as the private school I attended grades 6"-1"0. I was so excited, not nervous hardly at all. Though I knew I would miss my family, in some ways I couldn't wait until my mother got back into the car and drove back home, leaving me to revel in my newfound environment. Those were the days. College got a bit more stressful for me as time went on. And then in my last year I had very much lost sight of what I had come there for and had very little idea of where I was going. And I still don't. I reach back for that eager student who wanted so much, trying to claim her thoughts as my own again ... but they slip away, made unreachable by time and circumstance. I can only look back at her, in vague puzzlement trying to grasp something that she understood intrinsically, as sure as breathing. And I envy all the bright-eyed fresh-faced eighteen year olds who are starting their own 4-year journey through Smith's hallowed halls this fall in just a few short weeks. And I envy Winnie, who is going back for her final year, in much the same way as I was two years ago. And I'm still searching for that sense of direction which I lost ... |