Thoughts from home.

I'm back in Pennsylvania for a few days, soon to be in Ohio, then back to California. When I arrive back in this state by plane and walk from the airport doors to the car, I do recognize a scent in the air that you just don't get anywhere else. Okay, maybe in other Northeastern US states you'd get it, but it's not one that I live with a lot anymore. It's a combination of evergreens, oaks, lots of water in the air, and this time, the reluctant winter gently loosening its grip on the ground. It smells like there has been snow, it feels like spring is nervous to come but will anyway. I kind of love it. It smells like home.

And so I came all the way to little Meadville, which is growing in a lot of wonderful ways that I hadn't expected. Crazy brands of organic flour, and not just wheat - almond, flaxseed, anything - you can find it at our downtown Market House these days. On market days, people come and sell local produce, baked goods, salsa and other foods, along with home-made jewelery. There's more than one rainbow flag downtown - it's kind of crazy to see. In a good way.

But the really crazy thing happened tonight. The first night I got here, I rooted through my old room to find a book I wanted to read - a copy of a favorite book from childhood that I have in German. I have a big German exam next week in San Francisco (that I need to pass in order to be allowed to study in Mainz next year) and so I thought another way to passively study could be to reread this book. I opened it up as I lay down in bed, and a piece of paper dropped out onto my face. I opened it up and guess what it was -- a to do list, quite detailed, and from at least four years ago. About an hour ago, I decided to go through some old things in my room - in the process, as you might imagine, I found (and I exaggerate not) at least five such to-do lists, each written with such fervor (expressed, of course, by CAPITAL LETTERS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!) and such stress behind them - and of course, all of those things, I have long since gotten "done". And if I didn't, clearly they didn't need doing. The next time I write a to do list (it won't be long), I'll try to keep the worry at a slightly lower register. Clearly, it's not necessary.

I couldn't believe some of the other stuff I found in that room. From journal entries in my 3rd grade class (where I did things like spell "guess" as "gyes") to the complex directions to a board game called Arachnid that I made up with a classmate when we were into spiders ---- multiple flashy postcards with nothing written on them but with gorgeous pictures of various animals on the front (mostly big cats and wolves. I knew what I liked. :D ) - and "promotional posters", if you will, for a game called 'Squid!' that a friend and I made up to be played on the trampoline (these posters were pretty cool - the game involved lots of balls being thrown and bounced around ((while the players are bouncing, of course)), so these posters we drew depicted a rather cynical-and-somehow-cool-looking enormous squid with several balls in its tentacles), -- a map to a made-up country that another friend and I created, and the map was written in a language that we made up--- and of course, old schoolwork. A lot of this was boring - notes from old history classes, old math tests (back when I didn't enjoy it very much), etc -- but there was also a paper I wrote for AP European History called "Peter...the Great?" which was probably the paper I had the most fun writing in high school, and there was a project for English class that involved rewriting the "To Be or Not To Be" speech from Hamlet (if I remember correctly, my friend and I presented it with me doing the dramatic reading and her doing dramatic backup on the cello -- high school was pretty crazy). And of course, there is my Thailand box up there. So many memories in that box.

There's a really big book in my room - a journal, of sorts. One of the kinds of journals that you usually find overpriced at a bookstore, with artsy paper that's thicker than normal pages, an old looking cover and -- well, let's face it, all the things that I thought were really cool then, and to a certain degree, still think are cool now. I didn't write in that journal every day. When I did write, it was a paragraph here, a paragraph there, never dated, never in order. But I wrote about important things in there. I've never really gone back and read it before. It was from my middle school -mid high school years. I actually flipped through it tonight and read - and cried. Yes, there's the painful young adult poetry in there (standard, I suppose), but there was also some thoughts I had forgotten I had ever had, for example, about realizing that I was gay. That experience is chronicled fairly well in there, even though it's only in a few paragraphs. And about dealing with the first death of a relative. It was amazing to go back and read it. I tend to put "young me" in a box of sorts, to think that all my experiences then can be summed up quite simply with "I had a really good childhood, but high school wasn't all that great." But I think I was as alive then as I am now - I just can't remember it as well.