The River

Sara and I (and Brian, but he doesn't come into this story) have lived by the river for nearly two months now, but until this evening we hadn't gone. So today after everyone was awake and fed and had sat around watching the cat and wasting time on the internet for a while, Sara and I changed into swimsuits and headed off down the hill. It's a very short walk--maybe half a mile--and well worth it, because the parking down there is horrendous. We walked past lines and rows of waiting and parked cars, right down to the water's edge, and then upstream along the bank until the people thinned, and we found a spot to leave our towels. The water was deliciously warm, and the rapids relatively soft, and we waded and stumbled and half-swam, laughing, halfway across through the current until suddenly deciding to make camp on a half-submerged boulder. We sat in the sun, half-in the water, and talked and people-watched and drank in this gloriously beautiful setting-sun landscape in our backyard, and after an hour or so we collected ourselves and walked back up the hill toward home.

I hung my wet skirt and sarong on the back deck to dry, and was bombarded by a wave of childhood memories and nostalgia for all the countless days I walked to the pool and walked back, or walked to the creek and walked back, and hung my wet things to dry.

I smell like the river. It is the most perfect smell there is.

Determination

I've been looking through a college classmate's 365 project, and I just got to a picture of her joyfully holding up her diploma. There's a comment from another girl I had classes with, saying something along the lines of, "there's no other feeling like that in the world."

And then I remembered that I still haven't ever even touched my diploma. I was one class short to graduate (I finished it at VCU less than a month after the graduation ceremony at Mary Wash), and I didn't walk. They mailed me my diploma, because I was living over an hour away and never seemed to be driving through Fredericksburg during office hours. It's in a cardboard tube in my room.

When I need to, I usually work really hard not to give in to depression, regret, and despair. There isn't a great reason why, but this is one of those moments that I'm having to fight. I wish I had passed that stupid class. I wish I had walked with my classmates. I wish I, shining with joy, had held up my diploma for a picture. But I didn't.

Even so, I loved the class I took at VCU, whereas the Mary Wash class I failed (Post-Colonial Lit) gave me hours of successive panic attacks, at the end. Turns out that I'm not an auditory learner, so lecture classes with nothing to turn in until the end of the semester are not a good idea for me. I got to take the VCU class (American Realism and Naturalism, I think) with my best friend, Sara. There's not much I love more than taking classes with her, and we hadn't been able to take one together since freshman year in high school. It was great, and I loved almost everything we read, which is a pretty rare occurrence. Things worked out okay.

Even so, maybe I should get that diploma framed. I think it would feel really good.