Well, I'm finally back on my feet at Christendom College. My jetlag is gone, my stuff has been redeemed from storage, and I am painfully adjusting to the insane weather and giant bugs. Would you believe that it can be hot and foggy at the same time here? One should only be able to observe this phenomenon in the shower, but today I went outside at 7:30 in the morning and encountered a mysterious vapor that was more steam than fog. To make it even more hellish, these crazy Easterners keep their buildings at about 40 degrees farenheit all the time, so that your brain freezes over in Latin class and your glasses fog up when you come out.

Ah well. Soon it will be fall again, the bugs will die (yessssss!), and the trees will do that thing they do on this side of the country. Every tree will look like an upturned paintbrush and the Blue Ridge mountains will go Red with turncoat abruptness. It will be my second real Fall, far from the autumn of California "where the leaves fall not - land of my people forever." At Christendom there is a different aspect of Elvendom to be found. Soon I will be walking through the dark towards a star of fire tangled in the trees like the solitary lamp in a dark church, and between the falling leaves I will discern notes and spectral voices. When I reach the clearing, though, this forbidding air of Faërie will disperse, and there will be Peachy with his concertina and Sheila with her tin whistle and, if she can be summoned, Christina with her harp that the wind plays when she's not looking, that breathes inanimate music and reveals the architecture of the air. In Christina's hands that harp becomes a tower full of bells, or a wheel spinning thread out of flame. When the song ends a bodhran will strike up a running rhythm in the shadows, and my violin will turn fiddle and dance a reel instead of a minuet. And then there will be the singing of a score of voices while the sparks shoot starward. Let 'The Four Green Fields' be sung, and 'The Black Velvet Band;' and may Peachy and I get through all ten verses of 'The Old Orange Flute' without people throwing things at us.

::shocked silence::

Come on people! It's a funny song!