Falls Church gets ready for back-to-school
12.08.2022
I am sitting in a kitchen in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., in the suburbs where all the diplomats and their well-educated families settle to enjoy exactly such lofty kitchens and just-outside-the-city air as I am currently relishing in.
The porch door is open wide, allowing a warm breeze saturated in blue sky to waft into the room. The gust comes as a stark contrast to the otherwise frigidly inconsiderate, artificially cooled environment inside the house in summer, and the kitchen seems to gulp down humid rays of early afternoon sun.
It’s mid August, still suffocatingly hot, of course, but I can taste the first few notes of autumn on my tongue. Just the other day, the local news press published the headline “Falls Church gets ready for back-to school,” – the paper spotted laying open on a dry but manicured yellow-green lawn. And it’s true, the headline’s prognosis strikes a chord. Something about the smell quietly swimming into the kitchen rings up memories of school bells and freshly sharpened Ticonderoga Number 2’s.
Had I not been gone awhile, I doubt I would have picked up on the novelty of that smell, or that of the subtle bird song outside. Three years, however, had been just long enough to bury those memories into obscurity. There they laid, dormant, until this instant, this moment in a sun-bathed kitchen, breathing in brackish air, sweet hitting stale.
Sleeping beauty or an oafish gentle giant, these associations awaken slowly from their slumber following the wind’s initial kiss. I advance carefully, following the scent like a dog set off in the wild woods of memory. Turn left, turn right, the first breadcrumbs on the trail…
Resting compact childish shoulders on a matted white rug, sweat on my spike-scratched stern, playfully incapacitated: capable only of listening to the sweltering sky above me. Still a bit out of breath I inhale
and exhale, flash to a different, undisclosed year of life, falling down waterfall slides of recollection, leading to…
The unpopular yearly tradition of late, pre-school summer: my stubborn father, bent on killing our coveted air conditioning just a few days earlier than comfortable, then: the subsequent silent feud once tall enough to illicitly reset the temperature, spurring on the fan and drowning out croaks of night creatures and distant bird calls
Calling out, followed by…
The first relief of a moderate day to awaken us from our heat-induced sweat bath, a day like today, I let myself wander in the first moments of cool sweet air, bright daylight turned to purple-pink twilight turned to
speckles of sunlight shining through leaves at the end of the tree-dense path: I’ve reached the periphery of the forest, concluding in…
The end of summer camps, traded out for new school schedules and the boredom of waiting until the first day of school – feigning disinterest in the return to textbooks and timetables, but actually, really, truly, feverishly awaiting the begin of something new.