When that April with his showers soote...

As a result of bald tires and snow accumulation, I had to resuscitate my old purple LL Bean backpack from under the bed in order to tote all of my required-for-work gear on the EL. It's been several years since I've even acknowledged its existence. I found that, just as it did in old times, the purple carrier's three-chambered system worked out perfectly for my needs. Book, keys and sometimes phone in chamber one, purse in chamber two and the usually cumbersome laptop nestles itself effortlessly into chamber three. When I first drug it out, the backpack, I discarded all of bits and pieces that had been left inside - pens, notebook paper, change, some kind of airplane cookie - without paying much attention, or, more importantly, remembering the past life from which they came. Today, as I was picking up those pieces to transfer them into the garbage bin, I looked down to see a folded scrap of notebook paper. Curious, I unfolded it. It read: Oliver PR 1905 P43 1992; Monta HQ1149.G7H46 1985, HQ1599.E5 M46 1998...and so on. My eyes lit up, serial numbers for term paper books. I remember - Oliver was my short, ruddy-faced, curly-bobbed, bicycle-riding, gruff-voiced-but-mostly-jovial Canterbury Tales professor. Monta was my prim, proper, almost-to-be-confused-with-a-church-youth-group-leader-but-much-cooler-and-liberal Early Modern Women's Lit professor. Man, I know I've still got those papers somewhere. I'd love to go back and read them. I feel like I was much, much more intelligent back then. But it was a lot easier to spend an entire day thinking only about the effect Chaucer had on literature in the middle ages and what his characters the Wife of Bath or the Nun said about the role of the female in his work. Nowadays I spend most of my time spacing out, or trying to figure out how to cut a story that really needs to be 1,000 words down to 500 because there just isn't enough space.