Summer Vacation: Holes in Time

I have been away for a few days; you may not have known this, because I scheduled some posts to run while I was away.  But off I went, to Columbia, South Carolina--not exactly a summer vacation hot spot, although it was hot.  I went for a reunion of grad school friends, in the town where we got our graduate degrees in a variety of literatures from the University of South Carolina.

What did we do?  We're English majors, so we did a lot of this:

My Medievalist/Shakespearean friend has an amazing capacity to create scrumptious tea parties. 

My American Lit friend (from England) has an amazing capacity to create scrumptious scones. 

 

And of course, there's no shortage of people who are happy to partake.  We met family members and one day, one of our favorite grad school professors joined us.

We also went to a quilter and knitters' expo.  Lots of patterns, lots of yarns, lots of cloth. 

I bought two wooden crochet hooks, but resisted the beautiful fabrics and stunning yarns.

I also had a chance to do some reading.  I devoured And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass.  Why have I never read anything by this woman before?  I remember thinking about reading Three Junes especially when it won awards.  But I just didn't.  Now I plan to spend the summer catching up.  I found her writing luminous, and I loved the characters.

But the best part of our reunion was the chance to talk, to catch up, to delve more deeply.  We're all at the relative beginning of our 50's--the best question was "What do we want to experience/accomplish by the time we're 60?"  Stay tuned--I'm still working on that list.

It's hard to believe that I'm almost 50; part of the reason is that I'm blessed with good health.  I wonder how much can be attributed to the fact that I can still find the music of my youth on the radio.  Yesterday, as I drove home, I heard "Eyes Without a Face" by Billy Idol.  I got out of my car into the intensity of heat that is a summer day and thought about the first time I blistered across a Southern landscape on my way back to my beloved (then my boyfriend, now my spouse).  I had that feeling of falling through a hole in time.

In fact, that could sum up my past 5 days:  falling through a hole in time.  I'm happy that I can be with old friends and grad school professors, and we can take up right where we left off, as if it's 1990.