Sjanneke coordinated a 5K for the Empower Campaign. The 5K is tomorrow, but tonight was the pre-race pasta dinner.

I'd forgotten how much fun it is - the impreciseness of cooking in waist-high stockpots, preparing mass quantities of food on ancient industrial stovetops in church basements. When I was a kid, I would help my parents prepare large-scale meals at soup kitchens and I loved the frantic, joyful energy of it. I felt grown-up when I was put in charge of an entire task, like scooping fruit cocktail into bowls or drying off silverware and placing it back in the drawer. It was egalitarian - I wasn't in the way or useless just because I was a kid. Anyone with a pair of hands got put to work.

When I was in high school I read about how nostalgia used to be the name for a medical condition, and that in olden old-timey times people were actually said to die from it. It's just the sort of thing that sixteen-year-old me would cling on to. When I moved in September, I ended up going through all my poems and journals from high school. Man, did I ever emote some emotions. "Your eyes are the trash-can fires curling smoke signals into the smog-pink urban sunset." YES, REALLY.

Oh, I'd like to think I'm heaps more ma-toor than I was then, but I'm still the same crybaby ball of feelings. I gained some perspective. I learned to separate hurt from pain. And sometimes, I learned, even the pain isn't really so bad. Daniel Johnston said, "Got a broken heart/and you can't break a broken heart." Like that.

Still, sometimes I wake up here smelling the lovely, dying leaves and I'm so steeped in nostalgia I can't move. Mandarin oranges in a Jell-O mold. A fly in amber.

Seriously, though, by what alchemy does Autumn smell exactly the same every year?

My room has a big old-timey heating register. A metal shelf has been built encasing it, either to protect people from idly resting things on the white-hot coils or to create a functional surface out of an oversized bothersome structure or both. I hung a mirror above mine and used the shelf surface for makeup and jewelry, creating a sort of vanity table. It works.

When my mom was helping me move in, she was worked up over my choice to set THINGS PRECIOUS THINGS on top of the shelf and immediately pulled a tape measure out of her purse (cause you never know) and started making quick measurements and pensively biting her nails. I chalked it up to faulty circuitry from popping out three kids in three years and ignored it. But today in the mail, I got a package from her enclosing a beautiful quilted runner for the shelf in my three favorite colors. My mom has handmade me so many things over the years, from gluegunned hairbows to abstract Halloween costumes to my high school graduation quilt. As it turns out, motherhood doesn't expire.

Thanks, Mom. 'Cause when I said at 8 that I had to be The Blob from that '50s B-movie for Halloween, you could have said, "Are you sure you don't want to be a cat?"

Brenda waves a branch felled by Ike at her going away party.

I got a letter from her today from Spain.

Those months in Dijon, I thirsted for reminders of my comfortable, distant life back home. My mom sent me simple postcards about weekend trips, yardwork, and could I believe the weird thing my dad said to her? My eyes would well up. I'd get short of breath when I checked my e-mail on campus. Tonight I'll get wine-drunk on the terrace of a centuries-old rowhouse watching fireworks over the lake, but right now tell me that you sat through six hours of a Law & Order marathon. Tell me you singed off your eyebrows fixing the grill. Tell me you think your new haircut's too short.

Sorry, Brenda. I forgot. I forgot how faraway it can feel, being far away. Keep an eye on your mailbox.

I listened to My Aim is True and Armed Forces a lot in high school (usually through my walkman-to-tape-deck converter speeding down my street cause fuck was I ever late for school), but other Elvis Costello albums that are worth a damn I didn't discover until college. The first gift Nick ever gave me (we probably weren't dating yet) was a 45 of "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down". I think it followed a discussion of why Mr. Costello, as given to parenthetical titles as he is, would choose "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea" but not "I Can't Stand Up (For Falling Down)". Then we took a preemptive puff from our inhalers and rolled for damage. Ha.

The bonus disc on the Rhino rerelease of Get Happy! has "Girls Talk" on it, but it wasn't until this past summer that I discovered this song and played it and played it and talked about it and put it on compilations for people and decided it would be in the opening scene of my screenplay that will never be written. I'm sort of....excitable. You don't want to see me at Kroger went they have bing cherries on sale.

While digging for studying-conducive tunes the other day, I came across that 45 I've had for a couple years now and discovered that the freaking B-side is, has always been, "Girls Talk". I don't know why but I felt warm, full, in good hands. Sometimes it takes me a few laps to catch up with Nick and vice versa but in the meantime we do okay.

Here we are, doing okay.

Ana guiltily killed the black mantis in the kitchen today when she visited. "I'm sorry, little guy, but you have to stop terrorizing Evie," as she snuffed it out with a paper towel tube. Ana is made of railroad spikes.

As we took in the view of the autumn-marbled hills from my back porch, she assured me that I didn't feel far away. "It's like you're at your cabin, working on your novel."

Every couple of days, I'll wake up and forget that I live here. I'll expect to be in my old apartment, or in an ex-boyfriend's bed, or in my tiny trundle bed in the house I grew up in.

On my run today I noticed this weed flower, muscling its way into view from behind telephone poles and mailboxes so that half the street was dusted yellow.

It reminded me that it was almost exactly three whole years ago that I spent an important weekend in Freiburg, Germany. It was sometime after the friendliest dive bar served midnight spaghetti. It was probably after we were led to the secret dance party in the warehouse basement. At some point these pink-cheeked boys speaking fast, drunk German approached us as we tread carefully around the tiny canals that vein the city (we learned earlier that day that if you step in a Bächle you have to marry a man from Freiburg) and presented the three of us with enormous stalks of uprooted goldenrod, doffing their newsboy caps with gravitas.

I'm sure that before then, I'd seen goldenrod along the highways and in fields in Ohio, but I never noticed them. Now, and at the risk of sounding saccharine, they're forever linked with that city, and that summer, and being 19, and what a strange, hard, drunk, warm time that was in my life.

It became official this weekend when I bought a bike to keep in Columbus: I'm a joint custody kid. This was my first visit "home" since I moved, but I didn't get a lump in my throat every time I remembered that my time there was finite. It just seemed like, "Well, I'd better get back to Athens eventually, that's the only way I'm gonna get any work done." It's not so bad, this sort of split residence. It mitigates the grievances I have with both places. Columbus is still without power. The city of Athens voided my parking tickets. See?

As I was driving back from getting my hair cut on Sunday, extinguished stoplights on High Street like pendulums, the whole stupid town felt like a museum to the years I'd lived there. I saw the shop fronts and the bus stops and neighborhoods through fresh eyes again. Each time I passed a friend's old apartment, I imagined their images burned into the walls there, like an old computer monitor. I passed porches I've cried on, yards I've laid in, intersections where I wiped out resplendently on my bike. I wasn't feeling wistful or overwhelmed. I was just remembering.

Here I am on my first day of 17th grade.

On my first day of kindergarten, my mom wanted to hold my hand and walk me to the bus stop and wait with me there. I said, "I'm in kindergarten now. I can do it all by myself," and started heading down the driveway. While I'm not as fearless as I was then, with my sailor dress and applique tote bag, I felt pretty level and self-assured today. I'm used to myself.

The most important lesson I learned today was outside of the classroom. Don't ever lose your car's keyless entry fob. Because they cost ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS to replace. It is especially devastating if you've just spent three hundred dollars on books. Ouch.