I didn’t know what to expect when I moved to a boarding school. The thought of parenting at a high school just seemed bizarre. But, when I got here, it was somehow not strange.

I woke up my first morning, packed Emerson into her stroller and began walking up the hill toward the dinning hall in the warm sun. As the bells began to clang in the beautiful, tall clock tower on campus, I felt at peace. I was suddenly transported back to summer camp, in the New Hampshire forest, and later Maine, where I was greeted every morning with the sound of a trumpeter calling to my tired, deeply tanned body on the bottom bunk in a cabin packed with girls.

Past the clock tower (of today) was a sea of unending, immaculately manicured lawns, and stone pathways meandering into the distance. Again, I was transported, but this time to my college campus and the five years I spent walking up similar hills, on similar paths, with similar lawns enticing me to throw down a blanket and skip class to nap under a tree.

Sometimes, in the face of something new and foreign, the past is a comfortable place. We figure out how to walk through a new door based on our experience of walking through numerous other doors before. We use the familiar to slip as seamlessly as possible into the previously foreign.

And in a way, right now, I feel like I am being given a second chance to write my story….or, should I say, right my story. Because, I was often lonely at summer camp, and I was often miserable in high school. But now, I am at summer camp with my family and experiencing high school at a better time in my life. Life certainly has a funny way of providing richness and meaning….