It must be hard believing that I am the only one who really cared. Or that somehow or another, by opening the fireplace I had hoped for the blaze. But I didn’t hope it.
True. I hated sleeping in that 19th century post-bellum monstrosity. There were spiders larger than my entire right side that came out only when I was alone. At night. While I was peeing. The cordial sun was lovely and all the beaches that people hope for and all the rainy vista that town was good for added up to hating going there.
Which I will never know if that is true or not. That part of Charleston is closed to me. Or it feels closed to me.
“When the Messier Marathon first came to the Charleston College Observatory, we all thought Professor Stanley was crazy,” said the tour-guide.
The inside of the dome was smaller then we had hoped or expected. The five of us felt cramped. My scarf was itchy. I had no idea the South was so hot. The smell of paper mills and wetlands filled up the dome. The mouth of the edifice opened and stuckout its 16″ telescope.
“But now the event is regularly attended by more than a dozen people,” she said. Her enthusiasm would not have been accurately described as contagious. Most of us slumped and leaned forward waiting to use the eyepiece.