Jack Frost Nipping At My Nose....

Deja vu, much?

No Aunt Charity, I'm doing just fine with scarves and those hand warmers. Although I imagine I'll need to start stocking up for this "bad winter", soon.

School has started.

My cat came back, after being missing for 24 hours. And after me spotting her perched on a fence post 5 patios down and me fence....crawling....to try to go after her. Ended up not catching her until midnight the night after she got out because I went downstairs one last time to check the patio and she was curled up pitifully crying out there...

Ha. Serves her right.

Needless to say, she's not allowed anywhere near the patio anymore, now that she's learned how to climb fences!

It's Sunday night and once again I've procrastinated enough on my homework that I had to make a late night trip to campus. I would've gone to the computer lab only two blocks from my apartment, as I have since last Christmas when I moved, but I wanted double-sided copies so the Library it was.

It's chilly outside.

Fall came early this year. No Indian Summer for us. The trees aren't burnished gold, yellow, or orange. They are green with damp brown pathetic leaves smushed to the sidewalks. Nothing pretty about this Fall. There aren't many squirrels, either, although I've had MANY encounters with Chestnuts....

I should've known what they were right away. I knew years ago that Chestnuts had an intimidating covering that you couldn't get into until it was brown and not green, but it didn't occur to me until just the day before yesterday (when I tripped on a particularly large one and almost fell face first into the pavement) that the weird spiky balls of Hell littering my street were actually tasty nuts.

I picked one up for Chulee, my squirrel back home, but I accidentally washed it in the wash with my laundry yesterday....It's now smooth and feels (and smells) like detergent. Probably not healthy to eat :)

It's 9 p.m. and it's damp out because it rained quite a bit today. 4 Bicyclists passed me by, two joggers, a strange black man with sparkling white teeth that glowed in the dark so hard was he smiling at me, a posse of giggling girls (6), and a few brooding emo boys.

Sunday nights are busier than Fridays and Saturdays, here. In fact, the library is open until 1 tonight, whereas on Friday and Saturday it's only until possibly....6.

Weird, yeah?

So it's cold. Nipped my nose and everything. Actually had to keep my hands in my pockets. The trees aren't pretty, and leaves clutter the gutters and stick to my sneakers. My breath rasps and my nose stings.

For some odd reason, all of these feelings shot me right back to last fall when I lived in the dorms. I kept thinking: I better hurry home to Miki. I can't wait until I'm back in my dim dorm with the amazing heat. I should turn here for the parking lot and cross it at a diagonal. I wonder if anyone is in the rec room.

But she's not there.

Someone else lives in our dorm now.

I don't live on campus, I live farther away, even though I seem to be more timely (not by much, mind you) than I ever was when I lived ON campus. But doing this midnight jaunt to the library on a school night in a (near) rush to finish homework really catapulted me back.

I remember late nights in the Art Building in my drawing class and trudging home in the mist and chilly/damp nights to our steamy dorm room where my glasses fogged up right away. I remember skirting around the dead construction area on shredded bark and tripping across a damp lawn by the smoke shack where everyone always waved hello.

The path I took every morning is gone.

The shack has moved.

The construction fence is torn down, a building replacing the gigantic whole in the ground that I woke to every day for nearly 3 months.

Nothing looks the same. Nothing feels the same. It's cold outside, and I feel like there's nothing out there to warm me up.

So I'm going to sign off, print out my rhetoric assignment, walk home with my shoulders hunched against the cold, and huddle under the fuzzy purple blanket that Miki left behind and try desperately to read my homework.

Instead of letting my mind reside in the past.

Regards from Purgatory,

Monica