How Quickly It Becomes 'the Past'

I just opened up my tool bag from school for the first time in months, to gather my knives together for tomorrow's Knife Skills workshop for volunteers at the Ferry Building. Everything is marked with two fingernail polish dots, pink and rose, and the sight of them -- fish tweezers, plastic pastry bags, round cutters, bench scrapers (metal and plastic), bird's beak knife -- brought on a veritable wave of nostalgia. And it's not even that the tools themselves are unfamiliar. With the exception of the knife, I know I've used them all several times since classes ended. But the sight of them all together, properly marked, brought back the feeling of school, how tense and fast and fun it was, and how much camaraderie we'd developed by the time we got to the end. I'm looking forward to being part of a team again. I miss that part. And the tension.