...you could not step.

And now, they are all gone, all those lovely men and women who've grown up in front of me for four years.  In the rush and hurry of the day--the climbing up and down our huge hill, processing and recessing, reading names and moving in ceremonious union--the melancholy of it all stays submerged.  Even in the cold evening walk back over pea gravel, past the falling flowers, down through town to the officehouse to retrieve the car, the town's quiet is not yet fully sad.  But parts of tomorrow will be strange and empty, and I will be strangely grateful to have to burrow into final papers in order to turn grades in on time.

Twice into the same river...

Today, parents arrive in droves, and we have ceremony after ceremony, reception after party after reception, and the students start to realize that they are already leaving, that their parents' arrivals mean they're already separating from us, from life here, and that separating means, for some of them, that they'll come to cling even more tightly to having been here.

One barn I love.

I keep my eye out for this particular striped barn--which is just as colorful, just as randomly, on its other side too--both coming and going, each time I'm passing into or out of my part of southern Indiana.  It's this kind of barn out of which astounding quilts are made.

Doing it yourself.

Though the Brick and its manifold and multisensate pleasures were hands down my favorite part of Monday's trip to Jonesville, the garage a block away whose window had been repaired with a piece of Coke machine was definitely a close second.  (My pleasure at being on a road trip with my father was so crucial to the entire afternoon that it is inseparable from everything about where we went and what we did.)