So I thought I'd try something a little different than my "music playlist" stuff. I thought it might be interesting to highlight a particular song that brings back a very vivid memory. So first up...

"Sweet Jane" by the Cowboy Junkies

It's mid-March, 2012. I'm 26 years old. I'm in some non-descript, beat up car from the 1990's(I think blue, maybe black), traveling with two or three other guys as we were coming back from our Spring Break. We had spent the week in Tennessee, building trails in the Appalachia mountains, while staying at some lodge in some backwater place called Soddy-Daisy, close to Chattanooga.

It was a great week. Probably one of the best weeks in my life- Chattanooga was beautiful, the scenery was beautiful, I was falling in love with the "Hunger Games" book, which was enhanced by actually being kinda isolated in the middle of nowhere, and I was getting over my fear of heights by working on this trail in the mountains. I had even managed to come close to the edge of a cliff to take a group picture with friends. Our lodge was filled of cool, interesting people from all over the country. And we basically flouted the "no drinking" rule, because our particular group was not held as strictly to the rules as the other groups were. (The Boston University kids actually had some 35-year old babysitter/faculty member.) The year previous, someone had crashed a school-owned van during a trip to New Orleans, so our chapter of Alternative Spring Break did not use school vans that year, which meant that we did not have to follow the same rules as we did last year. The girls from our own group got to have their own cabin, which meant that we basically got to throw parties almost every night. It basically felt to me that I was getting the sleepaway summer camp experience, which I had never had. The theme from Salute Your Shorts kept playing in my head.

Not everything was perfect- I had this bad earache the first day or two, some of the kids I didn't get along with, and I didn't really get to do as much as I wanted to because they had too many people working on the trail, but still. It was fantastic. Wednesday night, we were in Chattanooga and walked the pedestrian bridge over the Tennessee river...it was an absolutely beautiful, clear night, and the lights of the city and the sound of the river below was just beautiful. I felt really lucky to be alive and part of the world that night.

Of course, all good things have to come to an end, and this week did.The song came on the radio on our way back up....I had never heard of it before. I asked my driver about it, and he said that it was a tune from the movie Natural Born Killers...I had seen it when I was little, but I didn't really remember the soundtrack.

I loved the tune. It was just the right kind of mellow and reflective...a perfect song to come down to while leaving an amazing vacation and coming back to the grind of school, my job, and my internship. We were flowing along the road close to the Virginia Tech as we went towards West Virginia...which was pretty much open country, strikingly different from the heavily-developed scenery that I'm used to seeing on the East Coast along 95. It matched the general feeling that I had- I felt real, and earthy. I didn't feel like some mallrat from suburbia, which is how I grew up seeing myself. I wasn't surrounded by the airy artificiality and conformity and congestion of where I had grown up. There was just this all this wide open country around me, and this song lulling me to a wistful, reflective state.

I was happy/confused/sad/accomplished/scared etc about what came next...grad school was getting ready to end, and they were the best years of my life. But at that moment, I felt wide open and hopeful, and loved that I had gotten to experience things I had never done before, like standing on a mountain or checking out the coolness that was Chattanooga.

I have never felt more free or full of possibility than I did at that moment. I think that above anything else is why I consider that the best week of my life. I hope I have other, better years/times/weeks than that one, but for now, three years later, this moment still sticks to me.