In memoriam to the child I once was, I will remember the road I walked to get to Keene State College.
With bloody nails, watermelons and crying about homework, I stepped from the life that I knew into the possibility of the next. As many things do, it started in the kitchen. An ultimatum of unweighable significance sat in my lap the night I chose which colleges I would be applying to. More than anything, I didn’t want my education experience to be over. I was grieving the homework I had gotten every summer since fifth grade; mourning the placement of class projects, and most of all the sanctuary of the school library.
Senior year meant only one year of classes left, one year of a close-by library and notably a lack of any future summer homework. I loved my classes and the work they all gave me, and I was always so fond of the essay directions I was able to take.
The thought of all of it being gone? Of returning to a time without the endless adventure of science and art and art galleries? It was too much.
At this point, I already knew that I wanted to go to college, swayed long ago by the siren song of active science. Even though I had an idea of what it might look like, it was terrifying to not to have a clear imagination of what or who I might become from it all. Never before had I been away from my household for more than three days. Call it growing pains, the ache that comes with primary feathers breaking through soft skin– what it was really about was the fact that I had no clue who would be looking back at my life in a few years.
Finding yourself is not an easy task, and finding what you like is more difficult when it comes with a two-year plague, COVID-19, that swallowed the world up only to spit us back out upon the shores.
This was one of the key things that led me to walk through the archways of Keene State. I had always been drawn to libraries, so when the world went dark, I curled within my magpie nest, a hollow of books and bones.
Book after book led to story after story being written when I couldn’t find the one I wanted to read. Only the true loss of it all was that in my inkwell of writing life I had stopped touching grass. The day after my sister graduated high school– and the summer before I started high school– my mother had found an all-organic farm that was looking for farm share workers. The place was named “Winter Street Farm,” a seed of hope embedded itself in the old tree of my hometown, Claremont, New Hampshire. After a brief introduction, the farm crew quickly welcomed me, and I started up there for a few days each week. In the beginning, I had been expecting planting rows and maybe moving some dirt around, but what was found was much more than that. Pulling up with the car’s windows down, June air already sickly warm, I was hit with the fresh smell of mud and sweet grass. It was almost like the sun had found its way into my woven shirt and through the tips of my hair, sinking slowly through my veins. It was beautiful. Still is, really. I volunteered there for two summers, then worked there through another one, and between the French music and endless days of working with the plants, something that had been forgotten, hibernating, came out again.
Before this, there was a time in middle school when I got into writing more because of the natural sciences, though. Considering my dual major between English Writing and Sustainable Sciences, it’s safe to say that the child I once was really shone through when I got here. I think the little bugger would have been proud. It was in middle school that I had learned I could just simply write the stories that I so desperately searched for — in the school system, there wasn’t a lot of alternative narrative fantasy to be found back then.
The specific point of reader to writer came with a fantasy owl series called the Guardians of Ga’Hoole by Kathryn Lasky. Following a hatchling named Soren, the readers are led through fourteen books of battle, heartbreak, and life through an owl’s eyes. I guess a short but good way to describe it could also be a really intense version of Peter Rabbit. I carried those books everywhere and would dream late into the mornings, through brushing my teeth and packing my school lunch, that one day I would understand the feeling of wind beneath my wings. That dream and that idea came before the book series, though.
The dream is what drew me to the covers, to the tales of owlets and hatchlings on a daring adventure.
It started with a tale of climbing and scaring the life out of my parents. From a very young age, I have loved being high up. Reasonably, that meant crawling from my crib and somehow scaling the bookshelves in the house. And outside of the stairs. Then, when a bit older, it meant scaling the actual archway walls of the house. Being high up taught me a good number of things, including that most of the time, there was no safe way to get down.
But birds, you see, they could just fly. The logic of a young child had me thinking about it from a very early age and because of my mother’s teaching profession, we got book after book on feathered and flying creatures. I needed to know how they ticked. How I might possibly orchestrate the growing of my own wings – and back then it meant physically crafting a pair.
My love for science – along with the strong attachment to continuing my education – came first from the introduction of a place called Vins, a bird and reptile sanctuary based in Hartford, Vt.
Buried between woods and a quiet town, the sanctuary is always bustling and brewing with constant movement and recovery from dozens of species. It’s a place for rest, and a place for becoming, as eggs hatch and scales grow back in.
Smiling workers show you around the signs, each containing their own story and the names of the current residents. In a way, that place put a face on the creatures that I had seen as beautiful.
Now they were real, and oh, did I want to protect them. There are countless fairy tales on caging the things that you find most beautiful, but more than anything, I felt the pull to help the patients to help them through the bounds that held any creature from flying. Vins is just the place that gave that opportunity to other people like me – people who want to help, not to hold them back. Following my first visits to Vins, I had gotten multiple scientific books containing bird after bird built. Their organs, frames, build, and most relevant: the exact layout of their entire wing structure. Now I wasn’t just learning and reading for my own construction – I wanted to learn how to protect them.
When looking at colleges and universities, I visited the campuses hoping to find a few very specific qualities; fragments of the places and people that brought me to seek higher education. Not only did the experiences of Vins, Winter Street Farm, and libraries build the most definable parts of my personality, but each one held traces of what they stood for within the programs at Keene State College. Vins brought me the need to help and strive for the protection of natural life — using the earth as a product and not as its own being is one of the greatest and most volatile human errors. Winter Street Farm’s workers and morals taught me the importance of sustainability in my profession.
Last but not least, librarians were always the type of people who guarded the buildings like they were sanctuaries. Within books, there are countless lives and adventures — not to mention life lessons – waiting for you. Keene, N.H., as a town holds true majority to all these points and in coming to the college campus, I found not only the fragments that other colleges had lacked, but unmistakable puzzle pieces the programs offered up. I wouldn’t have to choose one path over the other and the more time I spend here, the more I see the puzzle connecting into my future. This school is not just a place to get your degree, it’s also a place to find yourself and find where you want to go – who you want to be, really.
So, in a way, I gave up or stored away my very specific dream of growing wings, only to find that in coming to Keene State College, I had crafted my own, out of stronger material than the construction paper | once used. In that dream, I had found books, and from a hibernation came the nightingale calls of protecting the natural world.
Between pen and paper, and words drawn from my heart’s rhythm, they began to sprout down. Then, thicker coats and tail feathers, and within the first steps through dark-steel gates, primaries split the skin, pushing out to reveal the pattern of flight that had been there all along. Although not physical, the branching steps that led to Keene got me to the final path, the official clap into my college career. And from there? In memoriam to the kid I once was, I have to say a few final parting words:
You got your wings, and so so much more.
Lee Gleason can be contacted at
Lee.Gleason@keene.edu
