Missing

I spent 5 years as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When I left for grad school, I fled south because I was sick of winter, of overbearing winter that took the heart of the year and left everything else a brief flame. Summer and fall were too precious there. Spring was a week of rain in mid May.

There were things I loved about winter. Standing out in the cold after being in the hot building all night, with the sky filled with orange and purple clouds and the snow coming down softly and hugely. The city noises muffled with pillows of white down. The cold air on my cheeks, the cold air in my throat, the clouds of my breath rising and rising. The silence as the snow fell. The look of christmas lights in the snow.

But for the most part I have not missed Madison. I miss people: friends who changed my life, apartment mates and housemates and roommates who made coming home an unutterable joy and who formed a new family around me like a shield when things were really hard. The professors who garnered my respect and opened my way into the world of knowledge, who never hurt me, who never judged me. Colleagues in classes and people who I was able to find all sorts of happiness with. But not the city, except maybe the walk by the lake in late summer and autumn, the gathering quietness of the water, the way the ducks begin to speak to you while invisible on the shore, the way the wind moved in the leaves.

Today I did miss it, one thing in particular: I remember in my last two years at Madison that I could scarcely walk two blocks on campus without encountering someone known to me, who'd stop and say hello. There was one particular day that I made a quick walk from the physics building to state street and met someone on every block. And they were all different people--Pearl from my first women's studies courses, who was in band and whom I never would have met or known in the normal course of things but who was so friendly and full of joy that we were friends almost instinctively--Peter from my lab, on his way back from lunch--a student I'd tutored in physics two years ago--Mona, who was on my floor my first year in the dorms--a professor I'd had who knew me by name. It was such a warm feeling, a feeling of belonging and owning. That I was part of this place, and this place was part of me. And the blue sky gleamed through the yellow gingko tree, and I didn't ever want to let it go.