There’s a smell on my morning walk that moves me.
Something about dewy AM grass is a gut punch—the yearning kind of nostalgic. I can taste it, like melon and green, the humidity resting on my tongue like a South Carolina summer. I’ve searched the archives for a when and a where reference. And I found it.
Spring break. I am twenty, and waking early at my parent’s home. I pour myself bad coffee and douse it in cream and sugar like I’m putting out a fire. I clasp a book of poetry—one that lives beyond the scope of a syllabus, which makes me feel like a genius. I sit on the porch, damp with the last traces of night, and overlook a perfectly medium sized pond. Dragonflies buzz. I swat a horsefly from my face and scoot away from a spider who’s spinning her web on the wicker loveseat next to me.
I read about nature and imagine myself at Walden. I read a little about God, and write a lot about God—so much, in fact, that a decade later I don’t have anything left to say. Mostly, I absorb what I think it means to be interesting, so I have new party tricks to show off at school.
Those days were idle. Pondwater coffee could never taste as good as it did then. I miss that young girl in those Indiana springtimes.
But more, I think, I miss the possibility of the summer ahead.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, read one of your poems from those days in the red journal by your bed—then rewrite it with what you know now.
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