France smells like King William tonight.
I opened the kitchen window as I was waiting for my tea to boil on the stove and inhaled the March night air. It was wonderful, cold and slightly woodsmoke-scented, and all I could think to do was to close my eyes and picture the view outside my kitchen window.
I realize that I say I hate King William a lot - it seemed like a cage in high school and another world away in Richmond - but it's really as bad as all that. Growing up in that world, I grew up differently that almost all the people I meet in my daily life - it seems I learned to view the world differently from everyone else from the behind the protective shell of my backroad upbringing. It used to be a mark of shame and of difference, but now I have come to love that difference. Whatever shame there was is now gone. It has been replaced by something else - pride?
And here I am now, half a world away in Nantes. I've gone further than I ever thought I would from that rural world and yet I still carry it with me - it's like an old letter in my pocket, constantly folded and refolded. It is a silent comfort on cold spring nights like these when the world seems unspeakably large and the tea water seems to take forever to boil.
I opened the kitchen window as I was waiting for my tea to boil on the stove and inhaled the March night air. It was wonderful, cold and slightly woodsmoke-scented, and all I could think to do was to close my eyes and picture the view outside my kitchen window.
I realize that I say I hate King William a lot - it seemed like a cage in high school and another world away in Richmond - but it's really as bad as all that. Growing up in that world, I grew up differently that almost all the people I meet in my daily life - it seems I learned to view the world differently from everyone else from the behind the protective shell of my backroad upbringing. It used to be a mark of shame and of difference, but now I have come to love that difference. Whatever shame there was is now gone. It has been replaced by something else - pride?
And here I am now, half a world away in Nantes. I've gone further than I ever thought I would from that rural world and yet I still carry it with me - it's like an old letter in my pocket, constantly folded and refolded. It is a silent comfort on cold spring nights like these when the world seems unspeakably large and the tea water seems to take forever to boil.
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