Saturday, 17 November 2001 | Fade to black

We left early Friday morning, stopping in Pittsboro to put antiques on photo paper, my dad anxious to be my camera bag caddy and photo advisor. Another day of deep blue skies, early enough that the sun still cast sharp shadows. If you count in hours, the trip to West Virginia took a long time. Oddly enough, it didn't take long at all in terms of how the time passed in my head. In fact, time is moving differently altogether. It's slower here—I'm not able to overfeed my days with work and social activities and creating and cooking and planning—my life doesn't live here. Eating times are earlier. Bedtime and breakfast, earlier. And most of the time, I'm not even paying attention to what the clock says.

Today my grandmother turned 80 years old, so relatives from North Carolina, New Jersey, and West Virginia convened to mark the occasion and to stand in rows in front of fireplaces posing for the Whiteman paparazzi. Of course there's lots of food and always the suggestion of more…what more can we feed you? Is there anything you can think of that you'd want to eat? Can I get you another serving? Just one more spoonful?

At dinner tonight, after putting down my utensils in defiance, my new cousin-in-law began enlightening me about the rules she was subjected to during a semester she attended a fundamentalist Christian college in Florida. I don't even remember quite how it came up, but soon all of my cousins were recounting ordinances and guidelines and reasons for demerits and expulsion from their various Christian colleges, probably encouraged by my obvious shock at what they were saying. I felt sort of helpless with the information; where do I store that in my head? What do I do with that piece of knowledge? It's strange, moving from vague ideas to concrete examples far worse than you ever imagined. The only thing I knew to do was to make a list, as if that made it official or digestible, so that I could share it with someone who'd be equally incredulous. (To my relatives' credit, they find these rules much too extreme.) Anyway, here it is. The list.

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In less than four hours, someone is going to get me out of bed to watch streaks of white travel in arcs across the sky and fade to black. And I am going to crawl back onto my mattress on the living room floor, where I will, in turn, fade to black.