Sometimes I still have a sense of smell despite my allergies

We stopped by the Ypsilanti Co-op last week on our way to a social gathering, and I loved it. They're fairly small and didn't have what I was looking for, but they smelled the way a co-op should. The Ann Arbor co-op is like a small Whole Foods. And even Harvest has expanded so much that it doesn't feel or smell the way I remember a true community co-op smelling. But this one... was just right. (And someone at dinner, who originally hales from Vermont, knew exactly what I meant.)


I've also noticed that summer is smelling more like summer should. I love Boston, but summer rarely smelled like "summer" to me. Then again, it's on the ocean. The air is actually different. But Arthur and I were walking around campus the other morning, and it smelled like summer, the way I remember it. And it felt like summers on a campus, too. We may live on campus, but we're in graduate family apartments. It feels like suburbia. And the parts of North Campus I most often walk through do feel like a campus, but never struck a chord with me like the areas that we walked through this time. It reminds me of the summers visiting my grandfather at the university, or working on the Amherst campus in the summers. We were walking by some of the actual dorm areas, and behind the music building. It felt very different from the wide-open engineering area of the North Campus quad. It felt like a campus should.


Of course, one of those familiar sights was construction. Ah yes, summer campus construction. What's nostalgic on campus is a headache everywhere else. I wound up with a headache and a quarter tank of gas this weekend because everywhere I went required detours. Which made the hunt for soygurt even more ridiculous. (Whole Soy is currently out of production, and I'm having trouble finding Silk brand (I prefer their milk but don't care for their yogurt, but it's better than nothing). And the places I used to be able to get the quart containers aren't carrying even the individual cups at all. And so I wound up at Whole Paycheck to get a pint of coconut milk yogurt, because while it's incredibly expensive, it's the best I could do.) By the time I got home, the "ah, construction" feeling had definitely turned into "ah! construction!" with a rude gesture. But what would a college town be without nonstop summer construction?