Back in Brooklyn, I unexpectedly ran into a friend from Middlebury on my block yesterday. It might not seem so strange; a lot of Middlebury students hail from the Big Apple as I do. This chance encounter caught me off guard though because I had just been thinking about how good it felt to be walking around in a city—the noise and smells, the sights and the pace—how different it was from Middlebury. How different the busyness of urban life was from that of life at school, how strange it felt to look at the people I passed and not recognize a single face in a neighborhood that otherwise felt so familiar.
As I turned the corner, I made eye contact with the next presumed stranger. Instead, I saw a face that I recognized. Sylvia and I chatted for a few minutes, I met her mother, and we walked away with tentative plans to meet up soon. It was so nice to have the familiarity of both of my “worlds”—Middlebury and New York—all in one moment.
When I first started at Middlebury, I tried to separate the two. I wanted to maintain my city life, but also experience Middlebury to the fullest. My time at Middlebury seemed entirely campus-centered. Two and half years later, my experiences in both places are so intertwined that I cannot imagine putting them into separate categories. My friends from each place know each other, and if not, then at least names and plenty of stories—enough that if these friends were to meet, they would waste little time playing catch up. There are definitely parts of my urban upbringing that I may never adapt to life at Middlebury. I do not always remember that cars will stop for me in Vermont. Sometimes the drivers and I engage in a long waiting game as I stand on the curb, expecting them to pass me first. On the other hand, my penchant for flannel is a little foreign to my friends and family at home. That said, my life at Middlebury and my life at home are now virtually one and the same.
As I look ahead to this summer, I am so grateful that my Middlebury experience is not restricted to life on campus. I am spending the summer in Washington, D.C., a city with which I am unfamiliar. Without realizing it, I chose a city that also has a substantial Middlebury population, at least during the 2008 summer. My community is being transplanted from Middlebury to D.C., and I couldn’t be happier. I am still looking forward to exploring a new city, to being one of those anonymous faces in the rush of urban life, but I will be on the lookout for some familiar Middlebury faces too.