Town/gown

Author: Grady Ross

Last Saturday morning, I took a walk in the fields around my house. I had four essays due last Friday, two looming on the horizon and a couple of midterms during the week about which I was not particularly excited. I knew I could get it done, but I had no motivation.

For the first time since mid-December, the weather is not in sync with my responsibilities: I find it so much easier to be stuck in my room reading 200 pages when the alternative is a drizzly monochrome sky and blue extremities. Springtime in Vermont, on the other hand, was not meant to be enjoyed from behind a window.

I knew that if I stayed on campus I would let my work ethic (OK, my guilt) force me indoors to some thrilling analysis of iambic pentameter. No: to really embrace spring, I had to remove myself completely from Middlebury's environment of expectations and deadlines. So I took the fifteen minute trek home to spend a few hours meandering around the farmland where I grew up.

Forgive the following - I realize that it's overly sentimental. But if nothing else, it's proof of the power under which spring holds me. I should start perhaps with the smell: there is the spicy biting scent from the pine lot in back of my house, the sickly-sweet rot of last summer's grass making one final appearance before it yields to new green shoots, manure riding the breeze from the farm across the road, the last puffs of wood smoke from the neighbor's chimney as it prepares for a six month retirement. I imagine if emotions had a scent, this would be happiness.

Cheesy? Absolutely. But I am happy. And why not? Here is the tree where my siblings and I built our fort. Here is the giant rock on which we stood to wave to our grandfather, watching for his tractor to crest the hill each time he finished planting a row. Here is the oak where we collected acorns. Here is the stream, only present in early spring when the snow begins to melt, where we sent stick boats down a whitewater course.

I was completely disoriented when I returned to campus. I forgot for that hour or so that just down the road was an entirely different reality. What a bizarre scenario, I thought to myself. I can be at one moment a child, and just minutes later a student, running an independent and grown-up routine.

I appreciated the proximity of home more than ever on that walk. It is a place where I can wholly ignore what society expects of me and do instead what my instincts tell me. I know we're supposed to grow up, move on, embrace new experiences and live up to the potential we promised we had in our college applications. But sometimes I just want to race stick boats with my brother.

There, I admitted it: I get really sick of being an adult. I know I'm not the only one here. So, set aside responsibility for two moments: you know you'll get that paper done at some point, you know you'll make time to study. Let it be for now and go make some memories of your own.

There is no better time or place to be a kid again than springtime in Vermont.