Snowballs in September

It’s my first year at college. I’d been meaning to get my academic career back on track for some time. Creatively speaking, it had always been derailed by one project or another.

The initial rush to the beginning of school was almost overwhelming. The bookstore was always bustling with craziness, people clamoring to find course packets, books, and other required tomes.

Racks filled to the brim with T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, and shorts all silk-screened to perfection bearing the ubiquitous IU symbol. Pencils, pens, erasers….and it had that smell of books and pencils. New books. New No. 2 pencil smell. (In actuality, it probably takes a rather sophisticated sense of smell in order to distinguish between a No. 2 and a No. 5 pencil.)

Riding to my 9.30 a.m. class (some days that hour is so dreaded) on the bus revealed the veritable trove of diversity that this campus holds:

She was 70 if she was a day; her glasses were the kind that remind me in size of hockey pucks, spectacles indeed.

“It’s my junior year, honey. What year are you in?”

“Freshman,” I said, remembering that I was clutching a cup of coffee.

“I remember when I started that year; they wanted me to use computers.”

The morning light filtered through her blue hair. I imagined it was just a rinse.

“They like it when you do—makes it neater,” I said.

“I’ll make it neater upside their head.”

I had to laugh at her alarmingly sharp spunkiness.

Not a lot of this semester will be filled with papers being due, but some. I’m not very worried about it… yet.