I've got it bad - really bad this time. At least last year it took seven months for the infection to spread. This time it took two. Do the math. I've only been back since the first of September. Three months away + two months back = very agitated. That's a terrible ratio of long-term satisfaction. I'm ready to travel again.
I'm so ready that perusing plane tickets is my happy hour. When I got frustrated by expense and my duty to school I got a hair cut instead. I called the salon and fifteen minutes later found myself in the shop saying, "Here's my head. Have fun!" The excitement of snazzy hair hasn't worn off, but it cannot mask an even deeper desire to walk the face of the Earth. Wander.
Lindsey and I went out early this Saturday morning. We drove part way to Northampton, then parked and walked the remaining distance to a quiet country cafe at the base of Mount Holyoke. Barstow's serves organic eggs and meats, home baked goods, and twenty-five cent coffee refills. It's where we spent our Mountain Day after summitting at 8:30 in the morning. It's where we spend many of our Saturday mornings too. I like sitting at the "bar," a red counter that runs the length of one wall. Broken up by series of oblong windows, it makes me feel like I'm watching a movie in HD 3-D or observing the world from a fish bowl or airplane. It's my safe observatory.
Nothing feels too hard on mornings like that when you have daylight on your side and hours of possibility. The freshness of late fall air zings your nostrils and your throat at the intake of breath; you know you're alive. We worked, drank pumpkin spice coffee and fogbuster, and worked some more: Lindsey on her grad school apps and me on the emails and papers conspiring to take over my life. Rumors of lunch rumbled in our stomachs at half twelve. By one o'clock we had repacked our computers and notebooks to begin meandering back to the car.
Lindsey's cell phone rang. It was her sister. I walked behind along the mostly quiet highway, sneaking to stand freely in the middle of the road until the next car came. It's one of the adventure games I used to play growing up in nowhere Massachusetts. Hardly any cars ever passed along one of the only two paved roads of my childhood town. Sometimes I walked up my dirt road to stand in the middle of route 57. Arms spread wide, head tilted back, I felt free - a rebel - standing alone in the open space of the "highway." After some years of this, I even started lying down on the yellow stripes just to feel the exhilarating rush of danger. I would stare at the sky - the night sky, the morning sky, the afternoon glow. And when the rumble of an oncoming car vibrated the hot black beneath me, I scrambled up and away to sit nonchalantly on the Town Hall's decorative split rail fence. The town actually put the fence there to deter winter drivers from crashing into the very old and very mesmerizing maple tree that jutted high from its crabgrass lawn.
Possibility - the sheer idea of the coming adventures - spread a huge and cheeky grin across my face. Had Lindsey turned around I don't know what she would have thought. Who knows what the inmates of passing cars thought. I was much to excited to care. We sloughed through leaf piles, stopped to admire weird red-tipped trees, walked sideways and backwards up the windy pavement to the car.
"Somewhere," I said with agitation. "I have to go somewhere and I just want to walk."
"I need to do something crazy now before grad school takes over my life," Lindsey interjected. She was agitated too. We were like a pair of washing machines, fidgeting our way up the hillside, stopping here and there to look.
I don't know where I'm going next, but I'm ready to go. So much for trying to fool myself with ideas of settling into a job this summer. I'm just going to have to find one that sends me places. *%^& I need a plane ticket!
