Sunset in Wisconsin

[xaara]

There's a special quality to the sunsets in the Midwest. When you're sitting at a highway truck stop, drinking a huge unsweetened ice tea, eating some generic meat burrito and staying close to the wall of the restaurant to avoid the chilly winds that are beginning to pick up, the reds and oranges that mark the sun's disappearance are magnificently distant and unfeeling. The sun doesn't care about you. It hasn't ever cared about you and it's not going to start caring now. It will be here long after you've rejoined the cycle of life and death and renewal, and it will continue to rise and to set until a day that is too far away to imagine. The silos that dot the landscape cast huge shadows that stretch and stretch and finally disappear; the cows cluster together near the barns; the freshly tilled fields shine a rusty brown. The farms are beautiful, and the promise of life is intense. In a few months, cornstalks and wheatstalks will be appearing in the furrowed soil, snakes will begin to seek the shade of the young plants, and mice will appear as well, wary as ever of the snakes that hunt them but unable to live without the food supplied by the new growth.

Maybe a hailstorm will materialize out of nowhere and kill the plants before they bear their fruit. Perhaps they will be washed away in torrential rains, or perhaps the rains will never come and they will die, their roots suffocated by the arid soil. Once they reach maturity, the rains might then start, rotting their offerings on the stalks, or insects might eat them, or fungi might blacken their produce.

But maybe, just maybe, they will survive. They might grow to knee high by the fourth of July, and they might ripen in the autumn and they might produce rich yellow corn and dusty brown wheat. They might not. But they might.

I now love UW-Madison even more than I love Northwestern. UofC is a nice school, but a little small for my tastes and slightly pretentious. It's not anything I can pin down; it's just the feeling I got when I stepped out of the car. I love the liberalness of Madison, and State Street, which is populated by aging hippies and bad street performers. Besides, the education program at UW is excellent, and I want to start teaching as soon as possible.

I got my SAT scores today! I scored a 630 on my Math, which is worse than I expected, but a 770 on my Reading, which was unexpected in the opposite direction. My PSAT scores were a lot closer together, so I think I'll be retaking the SATs and concentrating on the math part. Overall, though, I'm happy. Those scores are probably good enough to put me into contention for all the schools I'm interested in, and after that, they don't matter.

After all, who really cares about a standardized test score after you've already used the score to get what you want?

EDIT: And since I forgot - how could I? - Happy Easter!

Comments

[carrole.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the SAT scores!

[xaara.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :)