home(from)dartmouth

I didn't realize how long it'd been since I'd seen the lights of the city -- any city --, but as I crested the hill and soared along Rt. 95, Baltimore's thick orange glow struck me head-on, the glaring red of the Domino's Sugar sign reflected in the car windows, the distant twinkling of the harbor lights harsh on the water. I didn't realize, either, how long it'd been since I'd been in a car -- with the exception of a four-minute drive to go thrifting, I'd gotten everywhere either on foot or by bike for the past three months. The ten-hour drive from Hanover, New Hampshire to Clarksville, Maryland, seemed interminably long, but, most of all, utterly unnecessary. Where had the stars gone? Where was the fresh night air? Why had we paved over all this beautiful land -- why were the trees forced to the sidelines of our architectural game? These were all questions I'd never considered before; although I'd traveled all over the country with my family, I'd never stayed anywhere long enough to consider the people, the landscape, the traditions, from any perspective but my own. Now, I find myself referring to Dartmouth as "home" in casual conversation, and my mother bristles and my father is pleased, but I mean it in earnest every time. As an adult I belong at Dartmouth, just as a child I belonged in this picturesque suburb of Baltimore.

An upperclassman told me once that coming home from college for the first time is strange. I didn't know what he meant -- I was excited to come home, to see my family, my pets, to eat my mother's Lebanese food and share stories with my father. Now, sitting in my room, the room I've lived in since I was two years old, I understand exactly. When you leave home behind to go to college for the first time, you leave part of yourself behind, too. You leave the part of yourself that's defined by your old environment, the part that was reliant on your parents, on the comforts of a familiar place. And once you firmly leave those things behind, you find that upon returning to them they exist only nostalgically; that is, you can appreciate them as holding their place in your life at one time, but now they exist in a new context. My mother's cooking is just as good, but it'll always remind me of when I got to eat it all the time; my father's stories are brilliant, but I'm hearing them now not just as his daughter, but as his equal. My friends are home, but they're my friends-from-high-school, who know me as an agglomeration of events and actions since the age of six, not just as the person that I've created out of all of those things.

So, as I go about town as I used to, I keep thinking that I can't wait to get back to Hanover, to my newfound freedom, my identity that was just starting to take shape without the crutches of familiarity, my new friends and my new interests. But I know that I ought to appreciate this week with my family, because although I love my friends at Dartmouth more dearly than I thought I could, people come and go, but your family and your home stays with you always. What I mean to say is this: enjoy your first home while you can -- there's no way you can come to Dartmouth and not have it become your second.