27/90, our house

Tomorrow, I am making myself pancakes for breakfast.

This seems like nothing. In this moment, it's everything. It's a new recipe to add to my collection (which I really need to organize this summer). It's a really healthy, from-scratch meal. It's full of peanut butter, my favorite food group. It's something that I've been waiting for all week: a weekend of respecting and rewarding myself for all of the work I've been doing.

Tomorrow technically starts my weekend. No classes. Four hours in the History Department Office. Four hours of translation. A few hours of reading homework before really kicking some assignment's asses on Saturday and Sunday.

I am incredibly excited for my small moments. I am looking forward to the smell of coffee, the hiss of a water drop hitting the warm burner below the pot, the steam rising from my cup. I am looking foward to the light  coming through our kitchen window. I am looking forward to feeling at home, instead of stuck in a place that is the in-between in my adult and childhood lives.

On the drive back from St. Louis Monday, I stopped to buy a juice. I got back in the car and began sipping my V8, and I was surprised to find myself feeling nostalgic. It took a moment to piece the scents that were coming back to me, the anxiety that was building in my stomach and the bit of sadness that was tightening my hand on the steering wheel together.

When Rachel and I moved into our house, before our junior year of college, it was just us. The walls were white and bare. The rooms were largely void of furniture. The downstairs bedrooms didn't yet have girls living in them. There was no rabbit. There was no clutter on the landing between our rooms.

In those days, I would sit in my room. The early morning light splashed onto my bed, warming my face. There was always a cup of V8 juice in my hand, in the same plastic cup that I found for 50 cents. It was easy for the two of us, me and Rachel, to finish off a bottle of V8 in three days. These were times when loan checks were rolling in, when we hadn't learned what winter utilities look like. Times of plenty, when going to the grocery three times a week was nothing.

The smell each time we walked through the door was a mix of summer and cleaning solution and emptiness. It was open and waiting. I don't know what that smell faded, when it was lost in the furniture we kept adding, when our roommates--two last year, two new girls this year--added their cotton candles and fruit-based perfumes to the mix.

Those early days seem brighter, lighter. When I think of summer, the scent of our new home hitting my at the front door, the scent of the bushes in front on either side of the front door and their stickiness against my arms when I trimmed them back that first month are the first things to rush back to me.

Tomorrow, standing in my kitchen in that early light while my roommates are still and the air in their rooms have settled, I may be able to call back that open, inviting scent--the one that tells me this place is mine for the taking.