I saw it while I was standing outside a door on the second floor of Mary Woolley, waiting for a class to begin. Next to me, behind an old half-wooden, half-windowed door, there was a hallway decorated with a series of four transoms, one right after the other. Each transom’s window glass, held together by a web of lead cames, framed a medallion. The juxtaposition of the medallions’ brilliant colors inside each achromatic arch created a bold, bright design full of magic.
I mean it, too, that the tetrad of medallions is magical. Each one depicts a color and its corresponding creature – red pegasus, green griffin, yellow sphinx, and blue lion. When Kit was researching schools, she learned Mount Holyoke women have voted for their class mascot since its beginning. These creatures inside the medallions, sculpted by art glass and soldered lead, were chosen by students in 1909 and they’ve stood the test of time. Even-year classes are red pegasuses and blue lions, and odd-year classes are green griffins and yellow sphinxes. When one class graduates, it passes on its color and creature to the incoming one. Like an heirloom, they are living reminders, connecting generations of alumnae down through the years.
The day after Kit received her letter of acceptance from Mount Holyoke, she found the College’s bookstore online and purchased her class pennant. She tacked it to her bedroom wall as soon as it arrived in the mail. Now it’s the first thing you see when you open the door to Kit’s room, that yellow sphinx pennant hung right below a calendar celebrating strong women. How fitting.
But the medallion I saw while I stood outside the door on the second floor of Mary Woolley didn’t feature the sphinx, rather it framed a rearing pegasus, her forelegs off the ground and mane blowing as she danced within a rainbow of color, swirling up around her. I took a photo of the pegasus and texted it to John because I knew he’d see what I did.
Ever since she was small, Kit has been all rainbows and glitter and unicorns. She is affable and affectionate, tenderhearted and true. And she’s innocent, but in a unique way that doesn’t equate to naivete. It’s that authenticity, I think, that enables Kit to always find the good and forego the bad. On her best days Kit is positively ebullient, and when she is John and I will look at each other as our daughter dances across the room and one of us will say to the other, “Rainbows and glitter and unicorns.”
I am none of these things, I know. I’m more grit than glitter so when I watched Kit dance across the room when she was small, I worried about the way the world may smother her spirit. But I should’ve never worried because now I know. Kit’s grit just looks different – it glows.
We arrived in Massachusetts a day before admitted-students weekend began because Kit wanted to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. The Homestead, the house where the poet lived that was converted into a museum, is a fifteen-minute drive from Mount Holyoke. It was closed for renovations when we toured colleges last spring so Kit was adamant this time around – we wouldn’t again miss the opportunity to visit.
During the tour, our guide took us into the “poetry room.” It’d been Lavinia’s bedroom way back when, but now it’s an interactive exhibit highlighting Dickinson’s writing process. Inside the room our tour group sat on benches as the guide taught us about Dickinson’s unresolved word choices, indicated on her manuscripts by a “+,” and how using one over the other would radically change a poem’s meaning. On the wall behind the guide was printed a line from one of Dickinson’s poems. He used inch-wide knobs attached to a sliding window to reveal the words asterisked on Dickinson’s manuscripts, as well as the potential replacements she’d suggested. In doing so, the guide revealed how word choice completely shifts the poet’s meaning.
The next day Kit and I sat in Chapin auditorium, listening as various members of the administration welcomed us to campus. One of the speakers suggested students approach Mount Holyoke like they did Choose Your Own Adventure books in elementary school. You are your own protagonist, she explained, and your choices will determine what happens next.
When the welcome speeches were finished, a moderator invited student panelists onto the stage. There they took turns answering a moderator’s questions, and each time they did I was impressed by the thoughtful eloquence of their answers. How fortunate Kit is to have the opportunity to study here, I thought, to learn alongside these accomplished women.
Before the panelists were excused from the stage the moderator asked each of them to share any advice that may benefit the admitted students. Pursue passion, chase curiosity, surmount stumbling blocks, and foster friendship, they counseled as they passed the mic from hand to hand, all the way down the table. The final panelist who spoke shared with us a question an alumna had posed to her. The panelist had interned in the alumna’s lab and when she’d finished, before she traveled back to campus, the alumna asked her, “Who are you to not change the world?”
Back at out hotel later that night when Kit and I were talking about the day my daughter asked me, “Do you remember when the panelist said the thing about not changing the world?”
“When she said it, I almost started to cry,” Kit confided. “I mean, who AM I if I don’t change things?”
I haven’t decided yet if life is a sequence of random or predetermined events. Are we our own protagonists, or are our unresolved choices annotated with asterisks, arbitrary to another’s authority? I don’t know. What I do know, though, is this fall Kit will begin to learn how to reflect light at different angles. At Mount Holyoke, she’s gonna make the whole place shimmer.
Shuffle Play 
Leave a comment