I love these dry, late spring nights.
They make me run a little wild under the hood.
The lilacs are in bloom. Every square inch of town smells like them. I think it’s been this way every year of my life, or at least many of them- I haven’t always lived around here- to the effect that the late spring lilac season is something of a wormhole for me- like this special little dream place, somehow removed from the world, that I visit every year around the same time.
Everybody in this town is from somewhere else. It’s wild. Everyone that grew up around here either left, or got settled in somewhere mostly out of sight. But the people out walking, and owning businesses, and living in new apartment complexes, are all from somewhere else. Lured here by social media (and the regional hospital). I prowl my own neighborhood but it always feels like I’m on vacation somewhere. Culture shock around every corner.
Late spring makes me think of foggy nights and bright green grasses under clear starlight. Pier evenings from adolescence. Orchard evenings from my late teens. Eastpark and the Bay Harbor construction zone in my early 20s (Bay Harbor is this pseudo town on the site of an old cement plant that this extremely wealthy developer tried to turn into kind of an instant town with it’s own little everything. It was slapped together like a cheap mini mall in the early 2000s, and the main building downtown- which had a coffee shop and some upscale retail below, with apartments above- had a special third floor penthouse with this big dome tower overlooking the whole ‘town’ and the lake- as it was right on the water. I discovered, late one night exploring with friends, that the elevator would take you all the way to that penthouse floor under construction, and you could get out there at night, in the dark, and wander around this half finished penthouse without a roof or windows, and play light house keeper star gazing the quiet horizon of early adulthood). When I worked at the hotel, these were my nights in the rose garden lamenting a missing love. In my early 30s, on the steps of my apartment on Grove street. Cigarettes late into the evening. A network of friends still, right at the final jumping off point of ‘see ya later’ adulthood.
Exasperation has weakened my respect for rules in general.
I don’t normally eat pop tarts after midnight, but here we are.
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