Does everyone learn that quotation in high school?  Or college, maybe, as I did from Waterland, about stepping in the same river twice?  It was Heraclitus, and I’m sure his observations were more metaphysical than the context in which i learned them, but it’s basically another way of saying, You can’t go home again.  Any time you step in a river, it’s a different river than the last time you stepped there.

I’ve had a couple of fun recent river steppings with another on the horizon.  This past weekend, my partner and I went up to the B&B where we got married last year.  It was so wonderful–the smell of the breakfast nook!  The main building lit with fairy lights!  the falls, which we finally got to hike to–but there was also a sense of what had passed.  Walking from our little cottage up to the barn where we got married, my insides twisted a little that I couldn’t see the rest of our guests, hiking up their dresses in the mud, on the way up to the ceremony.  My whole life, I will wish that I could recapture the Saturday morning I walked into the breakfast nook and knew and loved every single person in there.  I even missed the unbelievable sloven that A. and I had accrued from a few days of staying in the lodge–half-drafted cards and wilting flowers, cake with melted frosting, tissue paper and wrappings…that, too, was one of my favorite images from our wedding.

Now I’m about to step into a different kind of river: a reunion.  Vermont College, the best grad school in all the land, has a mini-residency for its graduates, which I think is very smart–keeps us involved and feeds our minds.  Lest you think it’s all a big fest of NECI cookies (sorry, joke for insiders), the mini-rez features master classes by Jacqueline Woodson and talks on fantasy by superstars no less than Gregory Maguire and Holly Black!  I am not very knowledgeable in the world of fantasy writing, though I do like to read in that genre, and I can’t wait to see what I learn by going outside of my usual realm of knowledge.

But I’m also nervous.  If I live my live occasionally nostalgic for that Saturday morning last summer, I also live it in deep regret that I did not preserve for posterity a scrap of paper I found at my little sister’s bedside before she went off to summer camp for the first time.  In her uneven third-grade handwriting,  it said, “What will it be like?  Will it be fun?”

I can’t even tell you how many times those words have come to mind as I contemplated any of the big occasions life has set before me, and, I must admit, the extremely minor ones as well.  I’m pretty sure the weekend will be fun, but what will it be like, to have my position as an actual student displaced, with others running the roost?  Will the faculty remember me?  Care?  (Okay, I have pretty much no doubt that they’ll remember me, since it’s a small program, but still.)  What will it be like to talk with my former classmates about the real-world events in our lives, instead of the business of grad school that takes over your life when you are there?  I am grateful for the chance to step in the river again; not everyone can find time and money to go to the mini-rez, and not every program is thoughtful enough to provide alums with a river path.  But still: What will it be like?  Will it be fun?

I bought some Chacos this year for my honeymoon–excellent water shoes, better than Tevas, so comfortable.  With luck, I will have my metaphorical Chacos on, too.

Riverbound!