Last Friday night I had planned for a quiet night in, pretending to myself to “catch up on work” when my real plans involved drinking tea and watching Hulu. Imagine my dismay, then, when I was about to get into my pjs at 11:15 and I received a text from my roommate: “Come to LoFo! Now! There’s nobody here! The DJ’s awesome! Come dance!”

Aside from a raised eyebrow about the excessive punctuation, it didnt take me long to roll out of bed and find my coat. My roommate (one of my best friends since we met the second day of Orientation in August 2008–we were neighbors on Stew 3, our freshman hall) is one of the Tri-Chairs for Brainerd Commons, one of the residential neighborhoods on campus. As a Tri-Chair of a Commons Council (basically a student activities board), she has many duties: running meetings for students interested in planning events, raising her eyebrows about the ridiculous nature of the name “tri-chair”, and organizing events for Brainerd students and the wider College Community. This year, Halloween coincided with Homecoming weekend, so the usual blowout Halloween festivities seemed to be taking a back seat. My roommate and a few other Commons Council chairs decided to remedy the situation by throwing a “Freaky Friday” Halloween dance in Lower Forest—affectionately called LoFo and commonly known as the creepiest room on campus. It’s pretty much a basement.

Given that the music started at 11, it wasn’t a huge surprise that there were about four people there by 11:15–college students tend to take “fashionably late” to an extreme. By the time I got there at about 11:30, though, the party was hopping and I dove into the crowd to find my friend.

“Hey!” she yelled over the dulcet tones of Ke$ha mixed with some sort of Dubstep beat. “So glad you came! It’s ALL FRESHMEN! And it’s AWESOME!” I looked around me to find that I recognized very few faces indeed for a dance party (dance parties are one of my main extracurricular activities, so I tend to know the crowd).

You might expect that upon hearing the party was filled with lowly freshmen that I, as a senior, would have turned tail and booked it out of there. One of the things I love about Middlebury, though, is that everybody is worth knowing, no matter their age or class year. I ran into some people from my Italian class, some people from the dance department, and met some people I’d seen around but had never been introduced to. I ended up having a fantastic time—it was one of the best dance parties I’ve been to in awhile.  As my roommate has indicated, it was indeed AWESOME, and worthy of excessive punctuation.

Coming back to Middlebury is always surreal, but after having been abroad for a semester it feels even more so. It feels different, but also exactly the same—like a place to grow but also like home. Or maybe it is me that is different this time… I am the same person I was when I left the country in January, but I’ve come back with new experiences, new perspectives… even fluency in a new language!

I find myself amazed this fall by how big Middlebury feels. Living in a Brazilian city for six months, I started out often Middsick for the cozy community here. As I got used to—and fell in love with—the city and Brazil, though, I started worrying a little about moving back to Vermont. I had such an incredible experience abroad that I didn’t want to leave Brazil. Words like “cozy” suddenly sounded like “confining;” “small community” seemed more like “claustrophobic.” Though I was looking forward to seeing my friends again, coming back to Vermont at the end of the summer (or Brazilian winter) seemed like I’d be closing myself tight into a little Middlebury box.

What I’d forgotten, though, is how expansive Middlebury is—in every sense of the word. The skies are big, framed by mountains. The buildings don’t crowd each other close but sit spread out across campus, so long walks outside, with the time and space to breathe, become a leisurely necessity. Adirondack sunsets and Green Mountain sunrises are huge—they take over not just a corner of the sky but the whole landscape, turning fall trees to flame and grey stone buildings to rosy shadows against a darkening azure sky. Looking up at night gives a sense of nothing but space—there are more stars than I’ve ever seen in one place. The scope of one’s outlook here, too, becomes expansive with such a diverse student body… and especially given that over 60% of my class is coming back from a semester or a year abroad, my friends and classmates are returning with widened minds and new perspectives. The people also seem to have multiplied: though the community does feel small and cozy here after the bustle and crazy of Florianópolis, I find I’m still meeting people every day—whether it be that kid with purple pants who’s always studying in Proctor or someone who turns out to also be a senior but whom I’ve never seen before.

Despite my trepidations, I’m finding it’s a nice feeling, this homecoming; the cozy, spacious feeling of snuggling myself into an enormous patchwork quilt.