but now summer is over

Hello. I am back, for real this time. We got in at three in the morning on Monday, and when I checked my school e-mail the next morning, there were eight million e-mails and little fires awaiting me. Yesterday we sat in departmental meetings for about six hours, and I am steadily checking my way down a legal-pad list that keeps sprouting little hydra heads and OH MY GOD WHERE DID SUMMER EVEN GO.

Oh, remember early May? Remember when the plants out back were tiny, orderly seedlings, and the months stretched ahead of me and there were five thousand fewer miles on the car's odometer? Remember when I headed up north the first time, bisecting the fat middle of Pennsylvania, and drove up state route 15 as a single-file parade of Mennonites walked with picnic baskets to the river? I cannot complain.  This has been a great summer. I got to see nearly every single person in my life, and I drove all around the great lakes, and spent time at three cabins and met a bunch of dogs. I rode a bicycle around Toronto*, and fell in love with IPA all over again, and taught some energetic and motivated students, and wore the same six camp shirts and pair of shorts every single week.

And then, last week, I took another up nort road trip. Only this one the B came along with me, and we went up to the city where we used to live and said hello to our old neighborhood, and then we went up and over the bridge and ate pasties, and then we wound down to Ann Arbor and toasted my cousin and his new wife and may or not have participated in a flash dance mob to a One Direction song but SPOILER ALERT WE TOTES DID.

But now summer is over, and in the next week, as I write eight million job application letters and field eight million online course snafus and want to push a freshly sharpened pencil deep into my eye, I will think about the blue of the lakes instead, and the mornings that were cold enough for flannel blankets, and the sound of a single loon late at night.

Here is one last slideshow, then.


 *which I keep bringing up because the last time I rode a bicycle, I drove it into a tree and ripped all the skin off my hands and knees and bent my bike tire, then limped into my junior literature seminar and pretended everything was fine until the professor asked me if I wouldn't like to go to the restroom and wash all the blood off my legs, and after that I got all scared to ride and walked the rest of the year, and then my bike got stolen five years later even though I hadn't ridden it, the end! So it was nice to be on a bike and not afraid even when all the traffic aimed directly for me!