I’m writing from the campus of Sewanee, in my dorm room on the third floor with the windows cranked wide so I can hear the tree frogs and cicadas outside in the night.
I’ve just come from another reading (four authors in the past three days) and the reception afterwards (I appreciate how they’re frequently feeding us and pouring wine), where Nickole Brown, one of the two poets on the faculty, set me straight about cicadas. I noticed her two necklaces of life-size, or possibly larger, cicadas and commented that the book cover for Sisters, her novel composed of poems, also featured cicadas. She said that she loved cicadas, to which I replied that that seemed kind of weird.
Why cicadas are cool
That was, of course, the wrong response and resulted in a brief lecture on cicadas and how we’re now experiencing two periodical (as opposed to annual) emergences at once, the 13-year and the 17-year cycles. She commented that the last time this happened, Thomas Jefferson was alive. So, one of the things I’ve learned so far is how amazing this current storm of cicadas really is.
What else I’ve learned
Apparently, Hunter S. Thompson is the one who said, “Beware of looking for goals. Look for a way of life.” I’ve had this image in my mind for years of a life where I’m walking across a college campus, along walkways crisscrossing between buildings and under a canopy of old trees.
And here I am, spending my days walking across Sewanee’s beautiful old campus of old stone gothic architecture. Some of the buildings, like All Saints Chapel, look like those sandcastles you make by dripping wet sand through your hand to pile up ornate towers on every corner. It feels great, stuffing paperbacks and notebooks and a water bottle in my backpack and setting out across the diagonal paths under old oaks, maples and elms.
One day, when Steve and I are in our version of whatever retirement will look like for us, I hope to be walking across a college campus in Atlanta, on my way to teach writing or literature to bright young undergrads. But that’s a good ways off, so I’ll enjoy this way of life during the next three summers for now.
