what I will remember

The bonfires, where every face was shadow and light. The way the mountains looked from the top of the hill, the way the clouds hung off them on the gray days. The taste of Long Trail Pale Ale. The Sunday evening that we ducked out from dinner and instead went for burgers and ate them at a picnic table off the highway. The brown mink that only I saw, fishing outside my window on my second day here.

LCD Soundsystem, Wheatus, Weezer, Of Montreal. What it was like to sit outside on the first truly hot day of the year, smeared with sunscreen, reading John Cheever and sweating through my t-shirt. The sound of the river. Our nightly ritual: walk to Mobil, grab a six-pack, take it to the chairs outside the studio. Sparklers in the dark. The not-unkind way we were informed that we were the loudest, drunkest, hungriest, youngest crowd in months.

Sitting at the dinner table, stabbing at our salads and laughing with our mouths full. The knives, the masks, the ceramic rabbit, the terrariums, the glitter creature, the sprinkles. How easily we recognized each other from afar, just based on our gaits: Double swagger, that's what you got, someone told me. The constant rearrangement of the Adirondack chairs; pull them apart, bring them close. What it felt like to sit on a quilt everyone swore was their grandmother's, in the late afternoon, trying out catchphrases and sipping beers.

The quiet hum of the writers' studio: entering the hive and pulling up new poems. The poems hung on my neighbor's wall, curling with each humid day. The two aerial photos of Patagonia that someone left on my wall, and that I left for the next person. The dance parties in the lounge on Saturday nights, the smell of bodies and whiskey. Walking through studios and being awed and floored and humbled and amazed by what they contained. The painter who arrived at lunch in his dark coveralls, the white handprints on his hips like bird wings.

Staying up far too late to discuss fiction and music and our desert island albums. Thumb wars. Running faster than I ever have down the hill to Metric's "Gimme Sympathy," grinning like an idiot. What it felt like to drive back into town from Montreal, feeling as if I'd come home. The loaner dog and her soft ears. Throwing knives and feeling like one of the guys. Walking through the cemetery at sunset. The sound of the screen door to the mill slamming. Reading new poems aloud, quietly and to myself, sitting cross-legged in bed at night. Waking up to sunlight streaming through my window. The night the hail blew sideways, the trees split, and we ate dinner in the dark.

The people I met, who remind me that there is a world filled with smart, hysterical, dedicated, passionate, amazing and kind folks. This feeling: fullness. That day at the end of my first week, when I sat outside by myself and took all the pain and frustration and hurt of the last three years and threw them into the river. The new mantra Fuck that noise. Falling into bed at night, bone-weary and grinning. A new manuscript.  Wearing bunny ears at the laundromat, our feet propped on a cart, laughing our asses off. The shadows that fell on the floor outside my studio each afternoon after lunch, welcoming me back.