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Take that, French purists. Next thing you know they'll be saying "pancake" too. Oh, the horror.
For some reason I think the things they say about why this language has formed and what purposes it serves are really neat. Yeah. I'm a geek.
As I turned from Broad Street onto Willow Path, I saw the moon hanging over the trees and let out an audible gasp. I had been vaguely aware that the moon was waxing, ever since in DC I saw it as a sliver beside the eerily blinking Washington Monument, and the next night saw it slightly wider against the sky as my plane descended. But I hadn't been prepared for this sudden fullness and brilliance, perhaps because I'd forgotten about the way the moon is at Colgate. I have seen the moon shining against the dark night sky, so bright that it casts a shadow. But I guess somehow I always assumed that the brilliance came from the contrast. Tonight I saw the moon after the sun had set but while the sky was still blue-white with the last rays of the sun. And still the moon stood out startlingly right above the trees, huge and bright.
I can feel the energy coming back to me here, but slowly this time, like a soup cooking over low heat. Last year the energy was more like cooking popcorn, the temperature rising quickly to a sudden explosion of popping. When I remember last year, the way coming here gave me that sudden feeling of freedom and wild excitement, I wonder if I'll ever have that kind of new start again, or feel quite that free of everything that once tied me down. They say that on a roller coaster the first drop is always the biggest and fastest, and from there everything is exciting but smaller, working off of the momentum from that first drop. I think that somewhere in the back of my head I believe that college is like that, and that I somehow have to draw out energy left over from last year to last for the next three.
But I don't want to believe that, and I don't think I have to. I believe that things work in cycles, and that this has to be more like a cycle than like a downward spiral. There are always cycles within cycles within cycles, like moons revolving around planets revolving around suns, and perhaps though we feel the smallest cycles the most distinctly, we need to look to the larger ones for our source of vitality when it seems that the ones closest to us are on the downswing.
As I scampered down to the band room today (scampered being an appropriate word because of how light my feet felt, shoeless for the first time in ages) I saw leaning against Cutten a huge pile of mattresses, shiny and new and all wrapped in plastic. As I walked by the building I saw the King Koil truck driving in with another load. That made me happy.
It also made me happy to slip in the side door of Read, which was propped all day, and go with Maggie to our room which was also open, and pull my mother's measuring tape out of my pocket and measure walls and furniture and windows and mark Ethernet hookups and outlets and phone jacks. And to go back up to our little room in Drake and painstakingly mark out the room on graph paper, making a scale diagram with separate slips of paper for furniture, and move it all around until we had everything laid out just the way we wanted. Sure enough, there was room for all the beanbag chairs and booksheves and the refrigerator, and as we had hoped we could arrange it so that the back part of the room was almost like a separate bedroom, and the front area had our desks and a nook for watching TV, and we were so excited that we wished we could go down and start moving furniture around right away.
It is a new year, with a new room and brand-new mattresses. One year is behind me. Three are ahead. The bulk of my Colgate years are still to come, though last year feels heavy sometimes. But I can't let the past weigh me down, or it will tilt the balance back too far and send me hurtling headlong into the wrong side of Time.
