Packing for Paris, where I am going tomorrow.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Night Two-Hundred and Nineteen
wednesday night still life
Packing for Paris, where I am going tomorrow.
Packing for Paris, where I am going tomorrow.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Night Two-Hundred and Sixteen
les chanceuses
It’s funny when you know something is coming for a long time and then it comes.
We are at the beach. We have been planning this trip for months. It was alternately intended to happen in Sardignia, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, but in the end we just drove a couple of hours south and rented a mobile home in a sprawling campground near a construction zone (so THAT’s why it was so cheap…) It is too windy, and when the wind dies down it’s too buggy, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve had seven months of what feels like the best luck the universe could muster, savoring our small-town dorm life like a group of international princesses on a hotplate vacation. Now we are very close to the end, and we just needed a place to enjoy our girlhood one last time before we all run off to grow up (okay, I’m really speaking for my old self here. The other three have a ways to go, yet.) Anyway, this mobile home (I’m sorry, mo-beel ome) will do.
I remember as a teenager often feeling that I had just missed out on the really good part. Like something wonderful had always seemed to have happened just before I got there, and all that was left were the older kids exaggerated recollections of how amazingly cool it had been (they had been freshman at the time, their perspectives therefore hopelessly skewed by their noses pressed against the glass). Probably things are never quite as good as they seem through the eyes of former high school freshmen. Still, I have caught myself more than once in the last few months feeling as if I was really truly (finally!) in the golden moment, exactly where I was supposed to be exactly when I was supposed to be there. And you know what? It really was as good as they said.
So, this is the beginning of the end. Tomorrow we head back to Manosque, and a few days after that suitcases will be packed and rooms emptied for the last time. We are sentimental, here at the beach, and resistant to the sentimentality, as if we might be able to slow the earth’s rotation through denial. Last night, as we were walking home from dinner, one of us sighed and said “Oh, girls…” and another one blurted out “Horse!” It worked. We were successfully distracted into a discussion about the French words for horse and hair and how easy it is to confound the plural forms (“first week mistakes, girls, first week mistakes”, our linguist chided).
There are new first weeks on the horizon, with new first week mistakes. Will our luck follow each of us home, or will it disperse as our proximity decreases, like wonder-quad powers? There’s no telling. We will pack our bags, we will get on buses and trains and planes, and we will see how far this fortune can stretch.
It’s funny when you know something is coming for a long time and then it comes.
We are at the beach. We have been planning this trip for months. It was alternately intended to happen in Sardignia, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, but in the end we just drove a couple of hours south and rented a mobile home in a sprawling campground near a construction zone (so THAT’s why it was so cheap…) It is too windy, and when the wind dies down it’s too buggy, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve had seven months of what feels like the best luck the universe could muster, savoring our small-town dorm life like a group of international princesses on a hotplate vacation. Now we are very close to the end, and we just needed a place to enjoy our girlhood one last time before we all run off to grow up (okay, I’m really speaking for my old self here. The other three have a ways to go, yet.) Anyway, this mobile home (I’m sorry, mo-beel ome) will do.
I remember as a teenager often feeling that I had just missed out on the really good part. Like something wonderful had always seemed to have happened just before I got there, and all that was left were the older kids exaggerated recollections of how amazingly cool it had been (they had been freshman at the time, their perspectives therefore hopelessly skewed by their noses pressed against the glass). Probably things are never quite as good as they seem through the eyes of former high school freshmen. Still, I have caught myself more than once in the last few months feeling as if I was really truly (finally!) in the golden moment, exactly where I was supposed to be exactly when I was supposed to be there. And you know what? It really was as good as they said.
So, this is the beginning of the end. Tomorrow we head back to Manosque, and a few days after that suitcases will be packed and rooms emptied for the last time. We are sentimental, here at the beach, and resistant to the sentimentality, as if we might be able to slow the earth’s rotation through denial. Last night, as we were walking home from dinner, one of us sighed and said “Oh, girls…” and another one blurted out “Horse!” It worked. We were successfully distracted into a discussion about the French words for horse and hair and how easy it is to confound the plural forms (“first week mistakes, girls, first week mistakes”, our linguist chided).
There are new first weeks on the horizon, with new first week mistakes. Will our luck follow each of us home, or will it disperse as our proximity decreases, like wonder-quad powers? There’s no telling. We will pack our bags, we will get on buses and trains and planes, and we will see how far this fortune can stretch.
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