suddenly summer is over, little sockets like empty gums where color used to heap. now, an economy of monotones; a minimalist gesture in distilling color and teasing out mileage from one crispy, sunbent, heat wrecked, time blown and inconsolable kind of brown. the autumn kind.
in the mountains it is more drastic. in a sneak attack, following a perfectly suitable and mild summer sunset, frost and recoiling mercury will lick delicately against the doorjambs like fire until you wake up one morning only to yelp and dive back under collecting every warm body and down-stuffed article available.
maybe it was last week's snow (yes! real! still there in high bowls!) or the tang of leaf rot and pumpkin vine that come in the snapping cold mornings, but it surprises me that, really, only a few weeks ago we had
and, more precisely,
now, upon waking, wool is being pulled over gooseflesh, knitting projects crown braids and (worstly...) socks and shoes, to brave the once lush and sagey backlands that are now
there is some romance certainly. a kind of (perpetual) theatrical backlighting, lonely blowing winds, banks of low clouds, the clutter and grate of winds heaving along sidewalks. as a mountainy kind of person none of this is new, but it is surprising how bone sadness sweeps in on cue and with crushing force.
....especially this year as i prepare (at very long last) to get great hulking gears back into motion for graduate school. for which i have tried my hand in a few times now with somewhat dismal results. but. with a great twist of fate, despite:......applying to a program at BFA student has never applied to (read: nor ever been accepted into), the challenge of presenting work which proves my abilities are strong enough to be accepted into said program which is comprised of 80% doctoral candidates, coming up (some some how) with a critical writing sample of 6 pages which i should have "lying about, leftover from college", passing the graduate record exams (can we talk about the last time i did math? hint: i was in the back of the car during driver's ed...), by, i might add, october 28th! and doing this all in the newly chopped up time frame of between-now-and-december-15th (vs. the original time frame of between-now-and-april-15.)....... i may be accepted into the Modular MFA Program in Creative Writing(!) (?) this is a program that works in conjunction with the Book Arts Program and the nationally acclaimed letterpress studio in the Marriott Library along with possible Fellowship study opportunities in the special collections of rare books. phew! work cut out for me and all the rest.
as a precautionary measure and for good morale, i have amassed various sizes of index cards, a fresh bouquet of fine tipped pens, a few ugly old notebooks to jam into backpack pockets during walks, a few hefty and poorly illustrated GRE guides, a good study software program and a thoroughly potent dose of anxiety. all i need is a highly fancy and well crafted silkscreened somethingorother to lug it all around with, then i'll be all kinds of hip.
i will seek to to be vigilant in my putting up of scraps of thought, image, occasional snap of a good braid, etc. you can count on me. that is, unless it's apparent i've fallen into some sort of hole due to fill-in-the-blank-overload.
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