Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Season Shift

This whole season-shift from semi-warm and mostly sunny to HOT HOT HOT and BLAZING RAYS FROM 9AM-8PM is making me nostalgic. For SUMMER memories, all of them years old, and they smack me in my tracks when I'm trying to go about my normal day, sweeping up Cheerios spilled by the Kiddo or going for a walk.

I have alternately needed to remember:
  • The three-week-long summer trip my family took in summer 98, driving from Indiana to Oregon and back again, doing everything from visiting Prairie Dog Town to camping in Rocky Mountain National Park to trying to see Mount Rushmore through the thick fog (we failed at that)
  • The summer I spent in drivers ed and the feeling that I was either old or insane, being allowed in the drivers seat of a car, in utter control
  • Walking around the huge old conifers at Avery Park (Corvallis), the immense age and weight of them, and watching the tubers floating downstream at the levee
  • My 22nd birthday in Iowa City and finally getting to spend my birthDAY with friends, eating pizza at a bar I'd never been to and never went back to, playing volleyball at a dorm none of us had ever lived in, and feeling the kind of friend-love you only really appreciate when you're three weeks away from moving to THE REST OF YOUR LIFE and the gravity of what you're leaving hits you
It's only natural, I think, that as you enter a new season, you can't HELP but remember the seasons of the years before you. It doesn't make it any easier. THE NOSTALGIC CRAB IN ME, FRAUGHT WITH LONGING FOR MY MEMORIES!

Is it just my astrological bent, or do you feel it too?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh my gosh, Kris...I have the most intense summer nostalgia right now. And, yes, one of them is DEFINITELY drivers ed.

I can't wait to make new summer memories on your birthDAY in Omaha!

You Are My Fave said...

You couldn't even see Mt Rushmore? That makes me so sad. I want to go there so bad.

E. Langley said...

how could you leave out COLBY, KANSAS?

E. Langley said...

or, in another time, COUNTRY STAMPEDE, KANSAS?