So the air finally gave us its first hint of the deliciousness of fall, and it feels somehow like I've been waiting forever for this moment, but also as though it's come so early in the year. My belly has that creamy feeling of hope in it, all rumby and tumbly like something amazing could happen. I love the sensation. I always used to wonder if I'd fall in love that day when I woke up with this feeling. It's like a suspension of gravity, as though someone were turning me upside down again and again, making me sick with giddiness. Or like the feeling of too much laughter or too much pleasure, this richness that swells in the belly and feels like a field of blooms. Anyway, I love it.
I can't believe that a year ago we were watching my grandpa die. But yeah, that's what time of year it is. Has it really been a year? It's so foreign to remember the moments in the house with my aunts and my grandparents as my grandpa slipped away. I was writing at the coffeeshop in Hammond, writing all the time when I wasn't with my family. I got into a chai habit in the afternoons. I was writing on my blog, writing lots of emails to Wendy, writing poetry, writing an academic paper to deliver in NYC. And I think my belly was all creamy then too, b/c it gets that way with the change of seasons, and somehow there were these moments of transcendence that felt so pure like I was floating above everything that was happening, a richness of being so present to these huge occasions -- life, death, destruction, creation -- and I'd cry sometimes over the beauty, the too-muchness of it all. How did we spin round to another year from there?
I guess it was the yoga studio that got me through from there. Healed me, protected me, gave me something really big to do, gave me a community of others to move with. Thing is, it picked up the pace in such a way that where the weeks in Ponchatoula were so slow, these months have ripped by like lightning. It's the excitement of a birth in my life -- my baby studio -- feeding and tending it as I move another way from the life I had chosen. Not much time to slow down.
Now I'm balancing that work with a job at Loyola. And I love that too. The students look different there, if I just stand in the quad and observe them, and I can't figure out how that happens. It's the same sort of different that was there when I was there, that I was part of. There's an artistry to the kids that's bohemian and uplifting and intellectual. It reminds me of me and my friends from that period. It's a quality that's not at Tulane or really at any other school I've attended -- not in such great quantity, at least. But it's here -- like these are the kids who might create magic, who might believe in magic and make great big magical stories of their lives. Why do they come here, though? What draws them? Is it the type of kid who is drawn to NOLA? And if so, why Loyola, why not Tulane?
It seems that every time the season slips its first hitch toward fall, I get nostalgic. The smallest details pop up -- like remembering the crazy shit I wore my freshman year at Loyola (the red, white and gold knee socks, the poet shirts) or balancing on the yellow line of a curb when I walked a certain route to my classes. I remember the faces of people that year whom I may never have met, though their faces formed an impression of the first days I spent at that campus, my first time away from home. Or fall the next year, sitting on a rock in Memphis, inhaling into Mike's shirt. Or in high school -- pep rally days with paper signs taped up on people's lockers, fight slogans against mascots like "the Tors."
But it's also today, the start of some new horizon, and I do miss my grandparents. In 2004, I went with Jesse in the fall to help pick collard greens in my grandpa's field, and the plants were full of aphids. Just picking the green got the aphids under my nails. So gross. But I was standing there, just loving being there, in my grandpa's fields that he had worked, and the slow fall of evening was gorgeous and crisp. Just like it ought to be.
