For the second year in a row Texas has tricked this poor mole into thinking it’s the opposite season. I was happily walking home this afternoon, for the second time in months, and thinking it felt like the last week of college. At my college we generally got one week of beautiful weather at the end of the spring semester to make us feel cheated before we went home. Maybe the town was doing its desperate best to make us miss it.
Seasonal confusion aside, I was thinking about how you can be away from somewhere for years but still viscerally remember it all of a sudden because you just feel the same way you did there. I wonder if it is mostly our senses that are responsible for this, or our moods too. The power of our senses to transport us is well documented, by Proust and his madeleine, for example. I have gone jogging on mornings not too long ago when a rare cocktail of rain and diesel fumes brought me back to the City of the Lion, Belfort.
I’m curious what exactly our mind is matching up when it makes these leaps. Does it look for light, humidity, temperature, and smell? How many of these factors have to fit? Since this has happened to me two years in a row, having springlike feelings when the veritable season is fall, I wonder if the feelings I had were responsible for the correspondence. Like Mole gleefully escaping from his hole into the spring air, or like my collegiate self shedding the manacles of campus, I was feeling a breeze that blew away the oppression of broiling pavement and the prison of air-conditioned automobiles.
It’s good to be back out in the world. Luxury condominiums have sprung up where before there were cheap motel-type apartments. Pits have replaced barren fields (see photo). I missed a lot while I was in the car.
The Crawdad Hole 