“ I’m tired of eating this,” she said, swallowing the last spoonful of Lucky Charms. They had become a mainstay of Christie’s diet in the introductory months of our freshman semester in college.

“ Me too,” I said, licking strawberry yogurt from the back of my spoon.

It was 9:30 on a Tuesday morning.  We’d dragged ourselves to the eight o’clock meeting of the religion class again. A small miracle it seemed.

Looking back on the first weeks that had past since I’d arrived at Winthrop University, I knew I had been deceived. At summer orientation when I selected my classes, I thought 8 am would be a fabulous time for a class and no one discouraged me from thinking otherwise. My academic career thus far began much earlier in the morning.

Since my parents lived 20 minutes from the high school I had attended and since I abided by every high school student’s code of careful apparel selection and make up application, my mother woke me each school day for the past four years at six. Rising that early left me all the time in the world to fiddle around, read the paper, gobble up eggs and bacon and try on every pair of jeans I owned, and still make the drive on time.

Assembling my schedule that summer, I thought an eight o’clock class would be a luxury. Instead of rising at six, I could roll out of bed at 7:30, grab a muffin in the caf, and be sitting in my desk before even the professor arrived. The freshman dorms weren’t even a three-minute walk from the Arts and Sciences building.

But, I hadn’t counted on a few things. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to snag a spot at the Lodge, the co-ed dorm reserved for upperclassmen three blocks from campus. My jaunt turned into a ten-minute hustle. More importantly, I didn’t realize college would be so different from high school.

I had imagined college would be a lot like the camps I’d attended. I would be whisked away to do exotic things like canoeing and taking macramé classes. I’d meet people from all over and swap jokes and stories. Maybe we’d stay up playing cards a few nights a week. Classes would be my axis. I’d arrive early, sit down front, use my new pens in my thick notebooks and follow every word of every sage who taught me. Ultimately, though, I’d return home, with more experiences to write about and a new T-shirt to prove I’d been there.

Quickly, I learned college wasn’t pencils and books and libraries, at least not my freshman year. It became so many more things. On a Monday, I might have sat up all night watching Gidget movies with my roommate, laughing until my belly literally ached. Sometimes, I might drive to Taco Bell to see how many burritos I could buy with the change I found under my car’s seat. A few of us would gather in someone’s room and dance Thursday into Friday, fueled by the beers in the bathtub.

Going to college was also going away from my friends and family. Until I went to school, I’d never lived in another place before. My parents’ house was across the street from the house my father was born in. And I’d had some of the same friends since grade school. I had grown accustomed to seeing their faces everyday between Chemistry and physics classes. I had eaten too many brownies and honey buns with Ginnie, my best friend, to count. Only Christie had come with me to Winthrop, but she too was on her own journey. When I dialed the phone numbers, I could tell those far-way friends were slowly changing too, just by listening to the pitch of their voices. And I could hear the same change in my mother’s voice when I phoned.

We covered the usual topics when I talked with her the night before. She asked what I’d done over the weekend and how my poetry class was coming; I wondered what happened at church. And as we closed our conversation, my mother warned me. She was worried I was becoming too familiar with the boy I’d been seeing. “ You’re not yourself,” she said, “and I don’t like it.”

“Want my key?” Christie asked.

I flashed her a knowing look and she handed it over. Another blunder in my scheduling was the spaces I’d left between classes. My first was the eight o’clock and the second was biology, three hours later. The first few weeks I had passed the dead time constructively. I read my notes, wrote letters, and even ducked into the silent, fluorecently lit caverns of the library. Now, I did what almost every other lazy college student tried to do: I slept.

Christie’s dorm room was mere paces away and rather than trudge back to the Lodge, I sought respite in her room. She had back-to-back classes until noon. We’d reconvene in the cafeteria for lunch and I’d return the key.

On this morning, sunlight poured through her third floor window, slanting onto the bed. I didn’t bother pulling the shade or closing the window. I enjoyed the long slow transformation of a Southern summer into a Southern autumn. The humidity disappeared from the air and the leaves on the dogwoods had begun to flame orange at their tips. I kicked off my sandals and stretched out on Christie’s bed. The comforter still smelled like her house in Piedmont.

She’d left her CD player on and I clicked the remote to discover what was on deck. Like so many other mornings, John Lennon’s voice announced, “ I dig a Pygmy, by Charles Hawtrey and the Deafaids. Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats.” I laughed out loud in response and tapped my foot in time to the acoustic guitar intro of “Two of Us,” the first track on the Let It Be album. And like so many other days, I attempted to sleep, but couldn’t. Today it wasn’t the pounding rhythms or John and Paul screaming the blues as good as any mojo-working Delta man that kept me. It was my mother’s words.

I heard them repeating. Had I become someone different? Did Seth and Lee, my two oldest friends, hear that tone in my voice when I called? I had been doing things I hadn’t done in high school—ignoring my schoolwork, writing in textbooks, visiting houses of people I hardly knew. Nothing crazy. I did drive across the state line to Georgia one night, just to eat at a different Waffle House, with that boy I’d recently met. And I had been spending most weekends with him. Sometimes we’d walk around the town, pretending we owned it. Sometimes we’d go to a poetry reading or join a drum circle. Sometimes we’d park my car in front of his dorm and make out. Certainly not the old me. The old me had never fallen in love.

But surely my mother would understand. She’d spent her freshman year -- the seasons following the Summer of Love -- spinning her Hendrix and Cream records while everyone else was still hung up on the Tamms and the Chairmen of the Board.

I sighed and turned on my side, watching the sliver of sunlight grow wider on the floor. I remembered the mail in my bag I had collected earlier. Most of it was companies begging me into debt by offering me credit cards with no annual fees. But there was one letter from my mother; I could tell from the blue-penned address.

I tore it open and read:

Whenever the leaves begin to turn, I think of “Let It Be” and going to school. You couldn’t be anywhere without hearing that song; it was on everyone’s record player. Every jukebox. Hearing it reminds me of the fun things we did.

I know you are having fun. Know that I love you,

Ma

Instead of shoving this letter back in my satchel, I folded it and stuck it my wallet. I switched tracks to “Let It Be” and listened to the opening chords of McCartney’s piano, ringing clear like pealing bells. And that voice so pure and ethereal, of someone eternally young. He had written this song about his mother, how she’d come to him in a dream, revisiting him after a space of so many years.

Britt Terry-Smith is a 25 year old graduate of Winthrop University with a masters degree in English. Currently, she works as a full time admissions counselor and a part time writing professor. Since she was small, she's been a Beatles fan, when her mom turned her on to them.  She also loves to read, attend concerts, tutor students, and spend time with her husband and dog. She also considers herself a raving Anglophile. 

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