By John Moses
Staff Columnist
We'll be behind the fence at Swayze field. We'll be walking in short shorts and tank tops up University Avenue. We'll be under the oaks in the Grove on Sunday afternoons throwing a frisbee to a yellow lab pup. We'll be in lawn chairs in the front and back yards of houses around town, sitting alone doing nothing because it's spring in Mississippi and that's reason enough.
You can find us on the porch at City grocery feeling the mild heat of a six o'clock happy-hour sun, looking down at real people in suits getting off work, hoping and praying that day will never come. Or at dusk you can find us on the eighteenth green at the golf course, with a twenty dollar putt that will decide between a Shiner and a slice of Fat Larry or the Pizza Hut buffet.
Of course we'll be on the beach at Sardis, day and night. Days playing with mutts, sitting on tailgates and coolers of cold beer, feet in the sand. Nights listening to tunes and voices around a fire, scanning a crowd of faces and looking for motive to stay a little longer.
Between classes we'll sit in quiet on the Circle's cool grass with a book open but we won't be reading it. We'll try but our eyes won't stay down, distracted by a lone coed or a wayward professor passing by. Then we'll stare through the trees and shiver from a morning breeze and clear our heads, wondering where we are going and where we have been, searching for answers to questions we don't know yet. And for a moment, in the complete stillness that hovers right before classes are dismissed, we'll forget who we are and nothing will matter.
We'll be in class some. We'll be at work. We'll eat crawfish at Forrester's on Thursday. We'll sun at the Holiday Inn pool. We'll take couches outside for no reason at all and sit there for hours until sleep or mosquitoes drive us inside. We'll ride bikes that haven't been touched in a year. We'll notice legs. We'll cut our hair short.
You can find us on the deck at Phillip's, eating burgers and hand-cut fries, staring at the sun and welcoming the heat, instead of cursing it like we do in the dog days of August. We'll stop and talk to each other between classes, late or not. We'll be with the opposite sex a little more often. We'll remember people and forget others. We'll drive through campus with the windows down, not looking at the road, going nowhere in particular. Then we'll turn around and do it again.
If you come out there, we'll be night fishing at Puscus Lake, catching cats with chicken livers. We'll camp at Wall Doxey. We'll be country road riding with cold drinks, getting lost and not caring.
Funny what this time of year does to us. Something about it all put together, the weather and the long days and the green grass uniting into a kind of drug that infiltrates everybody slowly, infecting even the coldest of hearts, turning strangers into friends. It lasts up until about the middle of May, when the world just seems to quit turning and the nights are as hot as the days. Then some us will pack our bags and leave for the summer, some to interesting places and some not, knowing that all will be well until we return in the Fall. And a few of us, with no desire to leave, will remain for the hotter days ahead.
Then there are those of us who aren't coming back. We'll circle the Square one last time and head out of town hoping that we left something, anything that will make people remember us. But no matter how far away the road takes us, we'll always be able to close our eyes on Spring mornings and still be at Sardis watching the sun rise over calm water.
John Moses is a junior English major from Memphis.