Goodbye, Garden of Eden

The sun sets on the beach -- on Birmingham as well. I'm off to Vermont College, and I believe I'm ready. Going to res is a little like going to summer camp, except with lectures, and a higher percentage of introverts, and no one to make you go to bed.

I went to summer camp for about seven years as a kid, for two weeks at a time. These residencies are shorter than that -- ten days. Leaving camp, I would always cry with the rest of the girls when they played, "A friend's a friend forever, if the Lord's a Lord of him," or something sung by Amy Grant.

(Yes, I went to a camp run by Alabama baptists who banned Disney's Little Mermaid because it portrayed a girl in a bikini breaking a commandment by disobeying her father -- but that's a story for another blog, or, hey, maybe a book.)

At the end of camp, I would always cry and hug the other girls, even though my best friends at camp were my same friends at home, and I never made a camp friendship that lasted beyond those two weeks. When I leave Vermont, I cry -- usually from lack of sleep -- but I do consider the people I've met there friends, real, live, tell-you-my-secrets, come-to-my-wedding, sleep-on-my-couch-for-a-week friends. And I get to see three of them tomorrow! I'll be spending the night pre-res at a hotel in Burlington, so for once I won't be starting the residency exhausted.

I've largely taken a writing vacation between semesters here, blogging excepted, and I don't expect to get much of any kind of writing done at residency, though being there always makes me eager to write. I'll try to update, but it might be sparse.

Very excited! Must sleep.

Currently reading: Skellig by David Almond, and I've also started, perhaps unwisely, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, historical fiction by Margaret George. I do not have time to read this book. I write my critical thesis this semester, which means plenty of school-related reading, and this book's a hefty 957 pages. I'm telling myself that reading a few pages a night won't take time away from the kids' lit. and YA, and I'm really feeling the need for some adult fiction in my diet.