Unsettled

In our first official meeting as a group, Core director Mark Boyd described spring at Penland as "an unsettled time." After a few weeks here, I've begun to appreciate the truth of his observation. The weather changes so quickly here, and, if I may be so pretentious, with it my heart.
Yesterday was gray and cold; I could see my breath but not the stars on my walk to work. One of the work-studies in the kitchen asked me to watch the windows and call her out to see the sunrise. I didn't bother; the sun was invisible behind the clouds. She was disappointed when I told her this. "I get up so early," she said, "but I never see the sun rise." I promised to watch the horizon for her on Thursday morning if the sky was more favorable.
This morning I woke to mist in the trees outside my window, and left the house to find that what I thought was frost on the windows of my housemates' cars was, in fact, drizzle. A foggy, chilly type of damp that I will always associate with the east coast of Scotland dominated the morning, until a fierce wind and rain storm overtook us just before lunch, hiding the mountains in deep blue murk as it approached. Rain soaked the afternoon; I was glad I had brought my umbrella (also I have received a lot of complements on it today, because it matches my new neckerchief). When I left dinner, the sky had cleared, bright evening sun illuminated the campus with a nearly colorless light, and a warm breeze blew up across the knoll. (Dinner was clam chowder. I'm beginning to think the kitchen can sense my mood.) Now as I write, dark clouds are rolling in again and the light is going out of the sky.
When I was preparing to leave Minneapolis and come here, I noticed a change in my emotional background noise. The dull and vague dread that had come to characterize the last year began to be replaced by a sort of terror that I remember from childhood and, more recently, from art school. It's a terror associated with motion, like the sensation in the stomach when you go over the top of the big hill on a roller coaster and feel the center of gravity pass the tipping point. Fear of that sensation kept me off of roller coasters for years, until I suddenly discovered that I loved them, and from then it was the bigger the better, and so as I packed and trained my replacements and had goodbye lunches I kept reminding myself of the possibility that what I was feeling was not danger but renewed motion, unfamiliar after some time of losing a battle with my own inertia.
It can be intensely quiet here at Penland, and I have quieted down inside as well, but in the background I can still hear the terror at times, though it has changed form (I suppose for now I'm not on a roller coaster anymore, but something more like "It's a Small World,
After All.") and sounds not so much like metal moving through on rails (though I do hear trains moving through the valley all the time) as like waves. It's a strange metaphor, but I've been visualizing the feeling something like this:
I'm standing on a beach. It's dark, and everything reads in black-and-white; all I can see is the white of the sand and the white of the breakers and foam atop the black waves. I hear the surf, and it's a familiar and comforting sound, because I remember the sea, but I can't shake the impression that the ocean is shallow and only goes out about 20 feet, only as far as I can see it moving. Beyond that is the real ocean, which I can't see or hear, and do not know. I imagine it as an emptiness, deep and black, and it makes my heart go cold.
This is not always in my mind. It goes away when I am melting wax, sanding plaster, winding colored thread around the handle of a spoon, or drinking a selection from the Twining's "Teas of India" collection (that box of tea has treated me right today!). Just constructing the metaphor above has made the feeling lose some of its power, which is nice but also a little sad, because it is frightening but deep, and I don't like to be scared, but I do like depth.
If asked, I would say that I am very happy here. But what I am most often asked is if everything is "all settled in." I don't have a good answer for that.

Trip to Penland, Part 1

My stepfather, John, arrived after lunch on Friday the 22nd. Naturally, I was nowhere near as far along with packing as I had anticipated. Heading to his truck to go to the bank to close my account and to Minnetonka to pick up the towing dolly that we would use to pull my car behind us, we made an unfortunate discovery: John had left his keys in the ignition and locked the doors. A quick call to Mom in Bloomington, Indiana confirmed that the spare set was just where he'd left it, hanging next to the telephone in the kitchen. Fearing the approach of the end of the business day, I went alone to the bank, which took just enough time for AAA to arrive and jimmy the lock.
Closing my accounts was the most pleasant customer-service interaction I've ever had with Wells Fargo: they smiled, they flirted, they took my personal identification documents at face value, they gladly accepted my word that there were no outstanding charges or transactions, they handed over my cash with politeness and ease. It was delightful, and I must say that if I had even once been treated so kindly by Wells Fargo when I was actually banking with them, I might consider opening another account with them some day. This has to be considered some kind of customer-service in reverse; I found myself wanting to stop doing business with them again, because the experience was so enjoyable.
Back at the apartment, the truck was open and so we headed out to the western suburbs to pick up our U-Haul device. I elected to let John do most (in fact, literally all) of the driving once we had the tow dolly hooked up, since he's into that sort of thing, having spent most of his adult life hauling around scientific equipment behind a Suburban. Thanks, John!
The rest of Friday night was spent packing. And Saturday morning. Ugggh. The less said about that, the better. I had stuff I didn't even know I had. I had stuff I didn't want. I had stuff I thought I had gotten rid of a decade ago. I had stuff I assumed was Ashley's, and let me assure you, if you naively assume that we're still living in the days when you can just foist an unwanted blender or rice-o-mat off on a soon-to-be-former roommate and she'll be happy about it, we are not.
We left Minneapolis around lunchtime on Saturday, John's truck filled to the gills with stuff earmarked for long-term storage in Indiana, my car, similarly stuffed with belongings bound for Penland, in tow. We had driven as far south as Savage when two guys in a pickup truck pulled up alongside and motioned that the tires on my car were smoking. So we pulled off, confirmed that there did in fact seem to be some nasty frottage and burning going on around the rear driver-side wheel, shifted some weight around to take it off that corner of the car, filled the tires (naturally, I had not done this before embarking on a cross-country trip), got gas (at $2.93/gallon; I suspect I shall never pay so little for gas again as long as I live [the lowest price I've seen in Spruce Pine is $3.19]), crossed our fingers and started off again. Subsequent stops for meals, bathrooms, snacks and gasoline appeared to confirm the theory that we had solved the problem - there was little, if any, smell of burning rubber and no sign of smoke.
I can't remember the name of the Interstate oasis/town in Illinois where we stayed for the night, only that it was one stop west of I39 on I80, a 5-mile digression that brought us a greatly expanded field of motel options, and that it looked oddly familiar (it is extremely unlikely that I had ever been there before). I think I can safely say that this is the only motel room I have ever stayed in where I did not turn on the television. I did steal all of the soap and shampoo, though, figuring I might need them in the future.

I have not forgotten you...

...dear friends, but these have been 3 very busy, very full weeks, leaving me almost no time until now to reflect on the many and massive recent changes to my lifestyle and report them to you. I miss you all, and from this point on, now that things have begun to settle down into a more comfortable and predictable pattern, I will do my best to regularly share my experiences here at Penland, as well as some of my thoughts and feelings about them. I suppose it makes sense to begin with a recap of my trip from Minneapolis to North Carolina, and of my early days here at the school. This will likely require several installments, so don't touch that dial, batfans... the kookiest is yet to come!