Last night was our first chorus rehearsal of the season. It’s the beginning of my third year with the chorus. At this point I’ve probably been in the chorus longer than at least half the group. When did this happen?

The first night of rehearsal always evokes memories for me being at UVa and starting a new year with the Glee Club or the University Singers – the humid September weather, new singers, new music, and in this case, even a “new dorm,” because it was our first rehearsal since Matt and I moved to the Village together over the summer.

During my first year of law school at UVa, I lived on the Range [holy crap – the Range has a selection committee now?], right near UVa’s famous Lawn. At the beginning of that academic year I hung out near the Lawn rooms on the night of fall convocation, when all the undergraduate first years attend a pomp-filled ceremony on the Lawn. I’d attended it as a first-year student five years previously and had returned in subsequent years to sing with one or another of my choruses. The loud buzzing late-summer insects, the sticky air, the young students in their Laura Ashley dresses and their shirts and ties and shorts, all nervous and excited and homesick, unaware of all the new experiences and personal changes in their futures. I always felt nostalgic at fall convocation, and particularly so that night, as I was no longer an undergrad.

I feel a recurrence of that nostalgia every year around this time. Things in life aren’t quite as new, fresh or exciting these days as they used to be. But it’s nice to have a hint of that newness again every once in a while, just to remind me how it feels.