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Camille Anding<br />
The Time Coin<br />
The last days of summer are not<br />
only stealing away all the flower<br />
gardens, they’re sending students<br />
off to college in pursuit of higher education.<br />
Delta State University probably looks<br />
nothing like it did in the fall of ’63, but<br />
some of the pain I felt after being left there<br />
by my family must still be bouncing around<br />
the walls. They call it adulthood, maturity, cutting the apron strings.<br />
It felt more like open heart surgery with no anesthetic.<br />
It was a strange campus in a strange land that I struggled to<br />
appreciate. I missed the red hills and tree-lined highways of north<br />
Mississippi. I unpacked my suitcases in a lifeless steel-gray room and<br />
set up home with a roommate that I had only met by letter. I was<br />
appalled that I was leaving a family of seventeen years to re-locate<br />
in an unfamiliar building and hang my toothbrush next to a perfect<br />
stranger. Would she be a new adult friend for life, or would she turn<br />
schizophrenic at midnight? Only time would tell.<br />
I relived some of those same emotions when we helped move<br />
our own children to their freshman dorms. Optimism attempted to<br />
remind me that college days were better with this generation, and<br />
everyone had cell phones.<br />
Optimism fled when we said our final<br />
goodbyes, and my jaw, that I had clinched with<br />
my teeth, didn’t hurt as badly as my heart.<br />
My trip home was a tearful “cry-down.”<br />
By the time we reached home, my<br />
composure had returned along with a positive<br />
mindset about the blessings of going to college<br />
and minds that could learn. Then I stepped<br />
into the back door and met the lingering fragrance of our daughter’s<br />
favorite perfume.<br />
A pain that can’t be rubbed away encompassed me.<br />
But suddenly I was lifted out of gloom to joy when I realized that<br />
our children’s fragrances had always been a sweet aroma to their<br />
parents. Their cologne and perfume fragrances were reminders of the<br />
blessed aromas of their lives that would always fill our home.<br />
We all leave behind aromas—sweet or bitter, kind or harsh, friendly<br />
or alien, generous or selfish . . . and the choices go on and on. Aromas are<br />
a part of all of our lives. Whether we leave the room, leave for college,<br />
or leave this life, we all leave some kind of aroma. An occasional “sniff”<br />
test might be in order for each of us. n<br />
66 • <strong>Fall</strong> <strong>2015</strong>
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