To Bloomington on Tuesdays

There are 34 ways to get from my front door to my writing circle.

By interstate or by avoiding the interstate.

Heading west or heading east – really, they both work.

975, 50, 65, 46, 135, 58, 446 – big numbers that bring me to my favorite place for words.  Words and sentences and paragraphs and stanzas that I write and hear, that take me so much further and farther than the numbered roads I just drove in on.

Grant and Lincoln and Washington Streets, where I turn and park and land to laugh and wonder and discuss all sorts of interesting things, from parking to weather to dogs to the current president, who I am certain will never have a street in Bloomington named for him. 

Some mornings I drive over hills and twisty turny highways, across Monroe, across that causeway that scared me so when I was a high school junior, planning to come to IU to study music.  I was scared that the road would suddenly collapse as that station wagon full of high schoolers barreled over the road over the water to gawk at the dorm rooms and classrooms of our future.

Somedays I drive through campus just to watch students, some hurrying, some not, as they head to class.  I remember wanting nothing more than an oxford blouse with my initials embroidered on the pocket, and a button purse with my monogram embroidered on the outside, penny loafers and knee socks, a pile of books in my arms and a boyfriend to walk me to class. 

Somedays I drive through the IU campus and think about not going there, not getting a music degree.  I did the other stuff, even knee socks, but at my beloved university to the north, where their unofficial and slightly crass chant at the end of “Hail Purdue” is “IU sucks”.  

Tuesdays, I drive and listen to NPR, knowing just where those stretches of road are where I can’t receive either the Louisville or Bloomington stations, and then I turn down the static and think about what the writing circle that day will bring, what I will hear, what I will share, what I saw on the morning’s journey that I want to be sure and jot into my journal, what might become a longer piece of writing, what may lead me to some great enlightenment – the tailgater on 46, the lone kayak on Monroe, the trees a slightly different color than they were the week before, the buzzards finding a possum breakfast, and always bikers preparing for Little 500.  Which didn’t happen this year.

My weekly hour and a half drive isn't happening any more, either.  
I miss my friends, their enthusiastic welcomes, the brief catch ups, the quiet of the circle room, with only the tippy tap on keyboards or the scratch of pen on paper or the whispered “good morning” or the giggle at sitting on a squeaky chair to interrupt the silence until we come together to listen, share, and be filled by women's words. 
Our friends' words.  
Our friends' hearts.

How I miss it.  And even after technological disasters on my end, I am thankful for Zoom circles. 

From my spare bedroom, I’ve found one more way to get to Bloomington.