I was just thinking about life as it was a decade ago.  It's funny how small snapshots of a time remain and gently haunt us as we age.  Birthdays and breakups fade, but that one time the moon was just right over the tired lights of the city; well, that stays a memory fresh and wet.

Tonight I asked myself where the last ten years have gone.  I've had this little hamster in my brain, who's now gotten off his wheel and has started nibbling at me, reminding me that I'm six months away from hitting thirty.  It's not necessarily a frightening thought (with the exception that I still feel like a 15 year old dork), but it is a cause for reflection.  Where was I in 1999?  Where were you in 1999?

Obviously, I was a sophomore at Tufts.  But my memory of the time is buried in piles of dead leaves, quartz flakes, and the creeping damp of the New England coast (hey, I was a geology major).  I think I fell in love for the second time too, and that made me a little crazy, unable to eat, and prone to what must have looked like petty mal seizures.  I was a little lost.

The trees were calico and turtle.  I remember Professor's Rowe, arboreal saints lining the streets, on the verge of fire.  I remember my middle finger pretty well - it was on display fairly often as I crossed the university's roads.  I remember tye dying a friend's Chuck Taylors along with my socks and dying my hair to better fit my role in the university's production of Rocky Horror.  I remember blankets that smelled like firewood and the scent of the morning rising as my friends and I guarded the Tufts' cannon all night, which we had just painted. 

Yeah, friends - at this time ten years ago I was meeting the women who I'd love and know for what I suspect is the rest of my life.  It was a lucky time.

I remember surveying rock formations in the gray as the wind tore my raincoat from me.  I remember the occasional bout of homesickness and the unexpected pangs of lack of surety.

But among all the small and great things that I recall about autumn, there's one short time that stands out from the rest and will forever remain brighter and richer than the rest.  It's just a tiny slip in time that portended nothing and meant little.  But this vignette is what I remember with the most affection from fall of 1999.  The best part is that this lovely memory promises the potential to repeat itself.

I was living in a university house filled with hippies (these guys wouldn't flush the toilet when they peed, trying to save water.  I was a tree-hugging, compost using, birkenstocks wearing kid too, but I had great faith in the state sanitation system.  I have never believed that one should let the yellow mellow).  I inhabited a corner of a large room in the attic of the house; two other girls had their beds in there, too.  I had only been there for roughly a month.

But it was a night where my roommates were gone and I was free to open every window.  I took in the chilled, smoky air and sprawled across my extra long twin bed and stared at the ceiling.  My quilt rumpled about my shoulders and a stray thread wormed its way into my ear.  I tried to shrug it off.  The roof boards were close to my face and slanted to the floor.  It suddenly felt cozy; my space, and my own time truly alone, and I liked it. 

I sat up and grabbed my Sony Walkman (remember, this was 1999).  I turned to a local radio station that was interviewing my favorite band at the time, Guster.  I ran my fingers through my hair and watched the strands settle over the side of the bed as I listened.  I think I giggled at one point.

Once the interview was over, I popped in a favorite Guster cassette and lay, prostrate in the sound.  With my feet on my pillow and my head hanging in the cold breeze at the foot of my bed, the ceiling dissolved into gentle sleep.  The wind and the music were a lullabye.

That's it.  Lame as it may be, that is what made my fall ten years ago. 

What do you remember?  Does anything stand out in these past ten years?

Tunes: Love My Way - Grant Lee Phillips