I spent the last 4 1/2 years of my college life at a school in downtown Atlanta.

“Four and a half years?  What?! ‘Last part’ he says….how long did it take him to finish college? ” you may be thinking.

It’s a long story that I’ll skip for now.

It felt like a long story when I was living it.

This was a school that, like any school in the heart of a city, was mainly concrete…concrete….concrete…steel and glass.  It was urban.  It was urbane.

It was far from being the wilderness I had floating around inside my head.

I spent my summers working at a summer camp in North Carolina.  It was “out in the woods”.

It was what got me through the school year…thinking about getting out of the concrete and congestion, the hectic pace…and back to the mountains.

(We live down the road from the camp now…and after the highway department paved the road and I got more familiar with the area, it feels like a “suburb” of the nearest small town.  I guess that anything feels less remote when it becomes your home.)

This video is kind of funny.

It reminds me of some of the “totems” I had when I was waiting to get back up here….little things I could look at and remember friends and places I was anxious to see again.

People say “bloom where you’re planted”…and I guess we all do our best to deal with the task at hand.  Sometimes, though, the memory of someplace important to us is hard to forget.

It’s funny how small things like a campfire on your office desk can help you cope.