In two parts and in two ways--to Minnesota and to the blog. First, I'll publish a now out-of-date draft I wrote a few days before leaving school last week. At some point with posts for this blog the options seem to be 1) edit, 2) publish, or 3) discard--all mutually exclusive--so I'm just picking option 2 here and washing my hands of the consequences.
Spontaneity cadenzas over the basso continuo of duty. I write a blog post when I should be swimming hard to save my floundering biology grade. I wander atop the Hill in the blustering wind under blue and clouded sky and surrounded by miraculous green when all that should matter is Ovid and Dante and everything I can prepare myself to say about them from memory. Where is the balance between these things? Where is life in the midst of it all?
I'm always trying to find it, Life. To sniff out where the storyline is leading me next.
A college year seems more momentous than any in high school. The end of the year means the scattering back to our many states this rare collection of far-flung folks, and the release into the wild of the ones with functional wings, return doubtful. We first-years will shortly find ourselves back in places still familiar, but grown strangely small. The place that reared us, we thought was the whole world. It seems smaller now. More world has grown up around it, next to it--in some places, over it. There's a whole list of things now that we know exist, that are not to be found in that world. All the things the people back home knew that people here didn't (why they call me Madskolnikov, that Minneapolis is on the Mississippi, that Sebastian Joe's is no ordinary ice cream shop and Magers & Quinn is where you get your books), that we had to teach each other, now stands by a list of things that people back there don't know (who Saga Steve is, that one must be careful never to immanetize the eschaton, that Targets and escalators and coffee shops in the plural are very special things). And we, lonely links between these worlds.
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There was more, but I've lopped it short. That picture, by the way, is from a magical nook in the ever-surprising town of Hillsdale. If you don't know where it is, you should go look for it, because I'm not telling. It's a secret.
So, second, I'm back in Minnesota for the summer, tucked away in a quiet parcel of land on the Mississippi. I woke up my first morning (I sleep with my shade open) to this, mistily muffled by the glass of my window:
So this is how we do mornings up here. Well, then, little town on the River. I see you can hold your own and then some.
As to what this new era, Summer After Freshman Year, is looking like for me, I'll leave that for a post of its own.
Till then!
