An Olde Memorie

I was riding my bicycle to choir practice this morning, and suddenly I smelled something (what?  I do not know) that sucked me through a vortex of a decade and spat me out onto the sopping green grass of a foggy spring morning in England.

It was 1999, in April, just a few days after the Columbine shootings, if you can believe how long ago that was now.  We’d settled into our B&B rooms at the Quilt and Croissants on Evesham Place, our clothes unpacked and hung up in the freestanding wardrobes.  J and I were in a tiny attic room with two dormer windows.  E and K were put in a room down a tiny twisting staircase.  My memories of the place are a little dim, largely reconstructed from pictures I took.  The stairs had some sort of loud pattern.  Our shower was underpressured, weak, the water usually chilly.  Directly across the street was a newsagent’s.  We bought McVitie’s biscuits there – caramel and chocolate covered plain cookies, sold in a tube, much like thin mints.  Tubes of cookies are my downfall – it’s hard for me to resist finishing the whole packet.  I’m positive I’ve told this part of the story before – maybe the whole story – but never mind.  Here it is again.

We’d wake each morning, eat a breakfast in the small front room (full English?  Just eggs or sausage?  Wheatabix?  tea!), then gather our things and walk down the street to the Shakespeare Center.  I still have all of the notes I took during our month of classes there.  When I was coming up in the world, we took notes by hand, there was none of this laptop facebook nonsense.  My handwriting was terrible, is terrible.  We had to write our final papers by hand.  I wrote mine on the plane home.

Strongbow and black was our drink – hard cider with blackcurrant liqueur in it, though nowadays I prefer beer.  Cider is too sweet.  But you could buy two liter bottles of the stuff, and we did on occasion, back then, bringing it up to our rooms and cavorting with the boys we loved at the time.  (Cavorting, I say, not canoodling.  I canoodled not a whit on that trip, I’ll have it known.)

There were trips in huge coaches to various gorgeous ancient English houses, there were falconry exhibitions, there were miles upon miles of shaggy English sheep.  We walked a great deal, ate a great deal of cheese, and drank a great deal of wine and cider, both in pubs and out of them.  What I remembered so vividly this morning was our early morning jogs.  Some of us would meet by the racetrack, where a greenway traced the northern edge of the track and then left it, running like a ribbon through fields of yellow rape – it went for miles, I would later discover on a bicycle, but on these mornings we would jog for just twenty minutes or so and then turn and jog back.  I can’t remember how many mornings we did this, but it was often enough.  Waking early to exercise has never been my forte, and it wasn’t then, but the fog and dewy green grass and achingly charming English countryside were enough to tempt me, and another friend or two, to trot out around dawn.  As I type this I’m remembering now that our teacher was a big runner, actually.  He would take students on long, fast runs, and I would occasionally go and immediately fall way, way behind.  So I often jogged on my own, down this easy-to-follow greenway.  In the United States, we have some green grass, no doubt, but there is no green like English green.  It rains approximately 98% of the year there.  Green is an understatement, that grass was . . . beyond description.  It shone, it shimmered with Green.  (The rain is annoying, difficult to take month in and month out, but apparently English plants need only water, and not sun, in order to flourish.)

It is springtime here, and plants similarly run riot.  Here, because of the sun and heat, they just grow really, really big – huge blossoms bending towards the ground, boughs of branches heavy laden, leaves as big as your head.  It doesn’t have the same feel, the foliage and landscape aren’t remotely similar, so I’m not sure why I was catapulted so unexpectedly into Memory Lane.  But I’m glad I was.  It made me think of old friends.  They were good days.