I'm back, obviously, and ready for the college updates to begin.
Having said goodbye to Subcontinent and watched as she left for a week of sometimes good and sometimes bad camping I settled in to a week of feeling glad that I still had a week left.
Until it started to get weird.
In an effort to lift the tension of waiting, HarvardGirl and I went on a mini road trip through the Amish Country where we did a bit of preparatory shopping and a lot of waving at passing buggies. During our visit to a nearby farm town where an ex-schoolmate of ours has a mafia-esque family that controls the area much in the manner of the Irish Mob (they have enough children for it, to be sure), we encountered the oddest thing I've seen all summer since the giant wooden nickel in Iowa City, the naked man in the Palais Royal and the upright Bible-thumping minister who misplaced his elderly mother in the wilds of Colorado. This was a Hippie Memorial, complete with a dedication speech assuring tourists to the site that the man to whom the memorial was dedicated was not a hippie.
Fortified with the assurance that we are leaving a very strange place indeed when we go, we returned to Midwestern Town and waxed maudlin over ice cream. That being done, I'm ready to leave tomorrow. Sort of. After going out to see La Vie en Rose (highly recommended, despite the fact that I now have nightmares about running into Edith Piaf in a dark alley) Mom's ploy of not letting me pack (I can't leave without clothes, right?) was foiled at midnight when I started cramming things haphazardly into trash bags and her aesthetic instincts kicked in, forcing her to give me advice.
This coming week I will be volunteering in New Jersey as part of a pre-orientation project. My group (of ten or so freshmen and a few leaders) will be organizing a carnival as part of an afterschool program and sleeping in a "big church." Then the real madness commences as I and my four (!) roommates vie for space and minifridge rights during the actual orientation period and eventual semester. Be assured that I will post regular updates here once I get settled in, now that the summer hiatus is over.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, the only Hippie Memorial in Amishland.