All Things Come Full Circle

For the first time since I left here more than ten years ago, I packed my bags, ate lunch with my family, told them bye, and drove north into the fading sunlight of an autumn afternoon to Starkville and Mississippi State University.  It was more than a little surreal.  As things will do, some things have changed.  Roads have broadened, rerouted, become four-laned instead of the winding, narrow, two-lane log-truck traps I remembered so well.  Most things, though, remain constants.  Noxapater is still a tiny speed-trap dot forcing everybody to slow down to 25 mph briefly.

As I drove, it was a little odd knowing that at the end of this trip, there was no dorm, no tidy Cotton District apartment waiting.  The shadow of the past, of that life where I used to belong here, was silently insisting that there was homework to do, that there were groceries to be bought, when I arrived.  Instead, there's a hotel room with two double queen beds, a fairly posh little living room area, and a two-day, grown-up job writing curriculum.

Tomorrow I'm planning to go walk around campus and see what's changed there.  I'm sure these moments of deja vu will continue, but I want to take my camera and get some shots of what of MSU that I knew remains.  Already all the dorms I lived in except for the apartments are gone.  Probably that's as it should be, too, but it will interesting to see what is still here and what has gone the way of my homework and midnight trips to Wal-Mart.