NMH Magazine : Winter 2006

Parting Words

On September 10, 2005, Dean of Faculty Lorrie Byrom spoke to alumni, faculty, students, and friends gathered on Round Top for Celebrate Northfield. The following is an excerpt of her remarks.

Jodi Picoult, an intriguing author, recently wrote, “Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based, others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.”
My memories of living and learning here extend more than 30 years. This fall, each day I choose to walk this hill, enjoying the light in the early morning and late afternoon and losing myself in my own memories. The birds have taken over here. Have you noticed? I love to think of them as the spirits of the amazing girls and women who lived and learned here. Could the spirits of Miss Tuthill, Miss Wilson, Miss DeWolff, and Miss Prescott be here awaiting the next phase of their school’s history? I think so! Are your spirits still with us here, given to us liberally each time you return? I think so.
As I walk the empty campus, there’s a palpable latent energy, as if the campus is on sabbatical, resting up for its next residents and grand adventures. Without students, I notice the subtleties, the small things that distinguish each building: the iron work on the back porch of East; the floral design through which the setting sun casts a shadow. I look forward to the end of the campus’s sabbatical and to its next life.
I am grateful to have grown up among outstanding students and adults, thriving in both the intellectual and physical landscape. Like many of you, I slid down this slope, sat under these trees grappling with challenging texts and ideas, laughed and picnicked with my advisees, and later brought budget sheets and strategic plans to the same trees.   
Last year I had the opportunity to share some thoughts with current students and faculty. It felt important that they know the legacy they must carry to the school on one campus. It came to me that I might find words to communicate that legacy in our archives. Janice Cort, in her prize-winning 1959 essay, names the power of this place:
   
The tree outside my window has roots that go deep in the ground. It is a very old tree and very strong, but are there not many such? I think not, for this tree is different from its brothers who grow in the forest. This tree grows in the Connecticut valley, in a place called Northfield.
One day in my final spring at Northfield, I began to realize a change…At last I found myself standing on Round Top and feeling very strange for not being able to enjoy the view as I had so often done in the past…Memories came flooding back like the tide: memories of particularly fascinating history classes, football games at Mount Hermon, Mountain Day, long walks with my roommate, discussions about the Bible assignment with the girls down the hall; all were happy memories and I smiled at the recollection of each one. Why, I asked myself, did I connect so much genuine happiness with my year at Northfield?...It was not merely happiness that I felt here, it was a serenity and peace that had dwelt here since its beginning and seemed destined to continue until eternity; it was security. I lived, and worked, and played in a fellowship. I was a living part of the fellowship. A great feeling of belonging surged up within me and I could see the valley and the little silver ribbon which is the Connecticut, shining in the morning sunlight. What a beautiful, peaceful place this is!
The tree around my window has roots that go deep into the ground. As I sit here and gaze at it, I know why it is different from its brothers in the forest. My roots go deeply too, and in the same soil.

My roots go deeply, with yours, into the soul of this place that we celebrate today. While the next dreams that will be realized cannot yet be defined, they will be born and actualized as many that came before have been. v

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