"Welcome back.....your dreams were your ticket out....."

Well, well. My, my. ............(rock and roll can never die.)

Etta Place is moving on.....unfortunately not to Bolivia with two bank-robbing scoundrels. Then again, I did recently meet a nice, clever boy in Logan who mentioned bank-robbing as a potential weekend activity sometime.....also, we spied on Bolivian cultural dancers from the top of a haunted amphitheater last month....so that's something, yeah? I may have met a Butch Cassidy to my Etta Place after all, at least for the time being....... (We'll miss you, Paul Newman.)

I'm beating around the bush here. Rexburg. I'm moving back to Rexburg.

BYU-Idaho has offered me a year appointment to teachy Engrish starting this January. I went to the interview for the free gas, the hotel room, and the chance to play with Sharon. Plus, I love the drive. They had me teach two classes, including a section of English 331 where I introduced Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I used my old gargantuan anthology of Medieval British Literature and tried not to stare too much at pages where Darren Zufelt had repeatedly written the word "poop" in my Sir Gawain margins. I feel like this experience is very fitting for the overall aura of this upcoming move back, back, back in time and place. Me trying to act mature when my former self is glaring back at me from the corners of the Smith building.

I am excited--this is definitely a large step up the ladder, monetarily and career-wise. Yeah, sure, I'll apply for some PhD progs for 2009....what do I have to lose? Yet, I am caught. I yearn for two lives...to split myself and keep my fingers in my work here with my girls and send another half of me to my old home in Idaho to gallivant away with old professors and dreams.

I have a student who can't read. She acted horribly in class so I pulled her out and have been seeing her one-on-one in my free period. We are reading The Hiding Place a few pages at a time and she's really getting into it. We've been researching WWII and concentration camps together--not the cheeriest topic to delve into, but delving! Girls who responded so coldly to me when I first arrived are chums now, staying after school and talking books and futures. We cried together with their parents in Bryce Canyon and I gave many hugs beside the bonfire under the stars. My Brit. Lit. students insisted I eat dinner with them on Friday and go to their house's group therapy. I haven't told them anything about leaving yet. I ate and laughed with the girls, the same students I recently took with me to see the Greek tragedy Medea at BYU last month, where we giggled and gasped at all the screaming, roaring, and gnashing of teeth, how they afterward bounced up and down dancing to the radio all the way back to Spanish Fork, while I laughed and shouted for them to quit shaking the 15-passenger van I was trying to drive.

I looked at the girls' pictures on the refrigerator--beautiful young girls with long blonde hair or short red pigtails, swimming in the large cement pond out back that was originally set decades before the school was built as a means of putting out fires on the farm. Pictures of girls snowboarding off the dumpsters in the parking lot, pictures of 4th of July make-up and wacky sparkler hair, pictures of all of them sitting family reunion style on the front steps. I don't know what I'm trying to express. I went to group therapy--I've been to a few now, and I'm always amazed at the places these girls go together and the light that hits them in tears or laughter when they realize something about themselves, their families, their former boyfriends who abused them, their former friends who they can never go back to if they want to have a chance at staying clean. I wanted to take my girls to see Romeo and Juliet on Valentine's Day. I wanted to go on the river trip next May. I want to read the end of The Hiding Place with J.B. I want to see I.M. go home because she's come so far, even just since I've met her in June. I want to write that Tupac paper with C.L. and that Bob Marley paper with J.S. I want to have another toga party when I teach Greek tragedies again (we all wore bedsheets and ate grapes and pitas with hummus, toasting each other with Martinellis and destroying an old fake plant arrangement so we could have laurel crowns behind our ears).

But the wind is blowing. I feel it under the hair on my arms. I could never die in Provo. I would have fluttered off eventually. Just not so soon! Papworth got it right when he took me to lunch last week....he pulled me aside and told me, "Don't sweat it kid, you've got the job." I told him I wasn't sure if I wanted it, and thirty minutes into receiving advice and perspectives from the rest of the party we were with, Papworth broke in and said, "Don't waste your breath, everyone. This girl has a phobia of changes and decisions. I've known this kid for years. You should have seen her trying to make up her mind about missions. She'll figure it out. And she won't pick it just for the money, either."

Well, the money definitely influenced me. But the rest I figured out in the following nights, between me and God. So this is it. This is where I take the running leap into the black vacuous hole of the future that somehow has coincided with the sepia-painted fantasies of my past.......thar be ghosts in them thar Rexburg hills. She's a different place than I knew from 2000 to 2003--there are new roads, real restaurants, a temple, and movie theaters that cost more than two bucks. Campus itself is a spiderweb of detours and construction: the Smith annex gone, the old bookstore gone, even whole parking lots gone. But I'm no fool. I know what visions creep through the upper levels of the McKay library and the sage-brushed expanses of land that surround Beaverdick Park. (Apologies for any of you cyberfriends who found this page by Googling "beaverdick"......it's all Mormons and virginity up in this site here.)

I'm nervous to run into 19-year-old Ghost Emily. Would she be proud or disappointed of her 26-year-old future self for returning to this dusty red city of Mill Hollow, Fongs, Craigo's, Horkley's? Will I find myself walking the snowy moonlit midnights retracing my steps from Hogi-Yogi to La Jolla? From American Manor to the David O. McKay Writing Center? Will I stalk those old houses, railroad tracks, and rivers, waiting for Trev, Jen, Serena, Joe, Jade, and all the rest to creep out and greet me as if never a day has passed? Will I start wearing toothbrush bracelets and keeping candy in my pockets? Will I be able to resist sinking back, but retain maturity, live as faculty, as returned missionary, as future possible PhD candidate in this bowl of memories both bitter and treasured?

I don't know. I am terrified as much as I am intrigued. I thought I had sluffed academia like a snakeskin. But being interviewed by old professors, old friends, walking into their offices and remembering the same old books on their shelves that they had when I knew them when--suddenly I want it again. I want the conversations, the debates, the theory, composition, competition. I love my job. I love my girls. I ache when I think of leaving my classroom full of magazine collages, Huck Finn displays, cards from girls, the stupid black crepe paper I've streamed along the room for Halloween. Sometimes you just have to leave and hope you left whatever legacy you were supposed to attend to in whatever territory you had become a citizen. I think I live my life like an old computer game......every stage, every scenario is crucial to the overall ending of the game, otherwise why would the programmer have created it? Every piece of inventory will have some kind of useful purpose at some point. Well. I don't know what I'm saying. I have until Christmas here and I'm going work my ass off. I probably shouldn't say ass anymore, either. Sexy Rexyburg. Hot damn.


Who'd of thought they'd lead ya? Who'd of thought they'd lead ya?