Summer begins.
I came back to thunderstorms in New Jersey. I left my window open to enjoy the rain and the pages of my books curled in the humidity.
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A beggar came on the subway train in New York, a flag wrapped around him like a cape, and began reciting a story about being an alien crash-landed on our planet who needed money to repair his space ship. Then he pulled out a saxophone and began making awful screeching noises. The other riders smiled amongst themselves in that "Isn't New York special?" kind of way. Finally he stopped and announced "If you pay me, I will stop." That got him a laugh and several outstretched hands with money.
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All I saw of reunions were the tents and the alcohol fences strewn across campus, and the muddy straw that has replaced the grass.
The undergrads have all departed, leaving in their wake great piles of donated furniture to be sold to the grad students for charity. I acquired a sofa and a chair and a mattress.
We returned one night to the piles in order to retrieve said mattress, and ended up with three, and two box-springs. And so it was that we were running a queen-sized mattress pile on its rolling bed frame down the middle of the street at midnight.
So summer begins. Last night, sitting on the statue of Dean Andrew Fleming West, eating watermelon, watching the first fireflies of the season come out, counting the stars as they appeared, arguing whether they were stars or planets or satellites.