Monday, April 6, 2009

this city

Well, I've got about a hundred different things I want to write about.

About three nights in a row I meant to write about how this city just feels like home to me. How the coast in general does, but particularly here. I've lived here longer than I've lived in any other place (or house/apartment) consecutively since I was twelve. It's that, I think, but it's the familiarity that that's brought. That sense of I've-already-been-here. Better, it's-that-time-of-year-again-already? I've begun to feel Wilmington, I know it's rhythms.

I know that in early January, right after the new year, there's almost always a warm spell. How in the coldest part of winter, if you walk off campus around five the sky through the trees looks like it might have caught fire, and that really those are the warmest days of the year. That we have a fifth season called yellow pollen season and it comes in March and after that we all start showing up to classes (or not showing up) with sunburned faces. Then school gets out and the storms come. Warm rain and warm wind and the way the air feels in our apartment as summer comes. It's the box fan running at night I think of, mostly, and it's because it stretches back to when I was a kid and we'd lay on the floor at the babysitter's and try to sleep but it was too hot and the fan sounded like someone mowing the lawn outside if you tried to picture it. And then there's hurricane season, checking weather.com every hour once something's formed off of Africa and it looks promising. Hoping for once it'll come. And then sometime around Halloween, sometimes before and sometimes after, you'll start getting cool days. And then your fingertips feel like ice. And then you hunker down for winter, southern winter that still seems to take forever.

I can tell you that the ocean is still warm enough to put your feet in around Thanksgiving. And that on certain days after it rains or there's been a storm offshore, you step outside and five miles inland you can smell the sound. And that if you learn to drive here, you're more aggressive than other drivers in other cities. How our city has a nearly visible economic and race line and you can blink while you cross it and open your eyes to another world.

It goes on. I know this city, I am coming to know it. It's becoming home.


Now, this isn't related but real quick: I've got tentative Romania dates. We meet July 8th, fly out the next day, and then fly back August 5th. So it's really short--shorter than any of the other trips by at least three weeks. I'm a little disappointed about that and I know it'll fly by, but I also know it would have flown by had it been two months. And really I am excited. STIM was wonderful this weekend, and I couldn't have asked for a better team. I can't wait.

1 comment:

  1. I know I've told you a billion times, but I really like your writing. This qualifies as another one that I like. I dunno, I just really like how you describe things. Something about how you go about doing it is just amazing.

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