Season of Change ... Five years in the Making

Fall's nostalgia is creeping in and will soon set in full boar. I noticed it Monday night, walking out of Dana's house in on the outskirts of Milwaukee, scurrying across Bluemound Ave. to get a toothbrush I had forgotten. I was wearing my coffee-brown cardigan, the one with tan flecks wooven into the cut, and its tie was snugged around my waist as I thought of a time five years ago when everything that I know in life right now was so very new. The fact is most of what I know and who I know about myself formed from that very watershed fall season of 2001, when not only me, but the entire world was changing. For a moment I felt very sad, not because I necessarily wanted to be in that moment again, but because there was an innocence I remember holding onto at the point, the creeping notion of something in flux--a transition, if you will. It was a time when I started sitting in a downtown music lounge--alone--after spending hours sitting at a folded card table on the outskirts of a common council meeting in places with names like Sussex. I attended a Town of Waukesha board meeting in a small room filled with angry residents talking about trash pick-ups ... and they were really angry, so much so I felt like I was in a movie, or a state even outside of my own.

I look back upon that fall season five years ago and realized in many ways, it was my own birthing season--birthing season for the music that moves my soul (I am of course speaking of house music, which I would never truly understand until 2005, but in 2001 I realized what it was starting to convey), birthing season for myself as a young woman finding her way through pitfalls of romantic perils and the first time falling in love. When I say falling in love I am talking in terms of the real verison--the notions beyond three-month courtships, distant admiration and interludes involving too much alcohol and too little sleep. All of it first shined its light on me during that glorious, tulmutous season and on its five-year anniversary I can't help but feel its a tug a little bit more with the creeping closeness of cooler days. There is a notion of moving forward and a notion of never going back. Jesus, would I want to? I just don't know.