A Playlist and a Story

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I guess I really am a Southern girl at heart, because I can’t stand cold weather. I have to be where it’s warm. After years of complaining about the D.C. humidity, I practically jumped for joy when we got a little bit of moisture in the air at my college in rural Ohio this spring – it felt so familiar, not to mention absolutely wonderful after the brutal winter we’d slogged through.

Now, in between frantic sessions of trying desperately to get hired somewhere in the district for the summer, I sit on my back porch with a book I’ve never read and soak up as much of the deliciously sticky and slow-moving atmosphere as I can – maybe hoping to make myself so sick of summer that I really won’t mind the chill when I move to New York.My backyard is overgrown with greenery (lots of poison ivy, so we never did much exploring) and tall, tall trees that stretch up to make a vividly verdant canopy above my head, filtering buttery sunlight through as the afternoon wears on.

And these afternoons remind me very specifically and viscerally of the first afternoon of senior week, as we thought it, when I and one of my best friends sat outside his apartment to finish our last assignment of college – a play, thank god – and we emailed it in as our friends came and went around us; my friend Emily upstairs was cleaning out her closet so I picked out a new dress, went home to sell my electric guitar to a good home with another good friend, came back with a six-pack of Magic Hat and returned to my Adirondak chair to enjoy the sun (it was too fleeting) and just-rained-last-night steaminess to the air, surrounded by best friends sketching, playing Civilization on laptops, selling the owl lamp, flitting about, and me in the middle of everything making a playlist – a hilariously perfect college afternoon.

This is the soundtrack to these afternoons – sweet and slow, heavy with possibilities.

Elisabeth (pictured, in shadow, with Emily and the infamous owl lamp) just graduated from Kenyon College and is spending the summer gathering the fortitude to move to New York and pursue a career as a playwright (Lord help her) in the big bad city. She has a baby Tumblr here, named for three of her favorite things in the universe.