August on Campus

 By Josie Millikan

Connecting my phone to my car's bluetooth, an old song from college starts playing automatically. Hearing the intro, I let it play.

This summer has been a rush, and I'm exhausted to the point of numbness. The sound of this old song floods my system with feeling for a second.

This week, students moved back into their dorms after a long summer break. 

Campus is full of noise again as the eighteen-year-olds, scared and running on a cocktail of forced confidence, caffeine and adrenaline, figure out the first details of their new stories.

Eight years ago, I was there, too.

When the old folks come and visit this place, they proclaim, "the campus has changed so much since I was a student in 1976!" 

What they don't realize is that it doesn't take fifty years for the campus to change. 

I've spent this summer making some of that change happen as we renovated our bookstore.

The dorm hall I lived in during my first year is modern and updated, with clean study spaces and a shiny elevator. The rooms don't have bats in them anymore, I can assume, though the basement is still as scary as it ever was.

My second-year hall received a much-needed renovation (or more accurately, gutting and rebuilding,) this year. Now they have lounge chairs in the courtyard, games and a working TV in the lobby, and ping-pong.

Our department's classrooms have doubled in size and in student body. The faculty has changed drastically from the line-up that taught my year.

As I leave the parking lot to head home for the day, I see a mother and father hugging their daughter goodbye. 

I can imagine the girl's walk back to her room from the familiarity of her parents' arms. She passes beautiful trees and unfamiliar faces, she climbs up stairs through chaotic hallways full of moving bins and into her very silent, very new little home.

My walls were scattered with pictures of my friends back home. My decorations did their best to capture my identity for this new world to see.

Over four years, my rooms changed a lot, as you might expect when one is living amongst friends for that long. 

Every new person you meet comes from a different place and has something new to show you. It's only natural that we form one another into new versions of ourselves, grown far beyond the nervous first-day kids we were for that short, feverish orientation week.

That was August 2018.

August 2026...

I have been married for almost four years now. I am expecting my first child this year. I still have the same friends.

I am a manager at the campus bookstore where I have worked a total of five of these eight years. My time there is coming to an end soon.

I feel incredibly young and yet slowly I'm feeling a little old.

My manager quotes, "We get older every year and the freshmen never age."

That must be why I'm seeing the campus this way for the first time.

In the past few years, I've run through this busy season with tunnel-vision, eyes on the finish line, just wanting work to go back to normal. 

This year, it won't. It'll slow down and then it'll be time for me to go.

As I drive home, I take the same route I took at eighteen.

I pass the same hills and fields. I've seen these valleys in mist and storm and sunset and darkness.

Coming this way back then, I'd arrive home where my family and dogs waited for me. The house looked different back then, too - even it was still growing in character.

My dogs, seven and four back then, are now fifteen and twelve. They are old men. We still call them "the boys," and they still run to greet you, though slower.

The house has held holiday parties, board game nights, plenty of visitors from out-of-state, birthdays and dinners and one huge college graduation party. 

In that first year, though, it was just me, my parents and the boys, and it was quiet, which was unusual to navigate.

Those four college years brought two sets of grandparents that moved to the state, as well as an aunt and her family, and hordes of new friends. 

The four years after have brought me marriage, a home of my own and this new life we're expecting to meet soon.

I take this same route home because my own house is only down the street from my family's. 

How can I express these things to the group of college girls I lead every day, as they navigate their own story?

They worry about their peers, their grades, their futures. When I was there, did I realize that every decision I made formed me into who I am today? 

How can I tell them that these things they worry about will fade from their memories quicker than they'll realize, and yet they'll know ultimately how important each experience was to who they'll grow to become?

That time moved so fast.

Time still moves in the same fashion.

Those four years were free, chaotic, joyful and challenging. 

Life since has been even better.

As the freshmen move in and start their new lives, scared to sit with new people in the cafeteria or finding themselves strangely content with the peace of a solo walk back to their room at night, do they also feel something deep inside of their spirit, telling them how important it all is?

They're currently reading the first page of their favorite book for the first time.

Someday they'll recall that rare feeling, as we all do.

Next semester I'll return to campus to see my bookstore girls graduate.

I'll probably talk about all of the things that have changed in only a semester.

My son will meet many people, all new to him and important to me.

My husband and I will walk the same paths we did as teenagers, with our baby in our arms.

I'll tell the girls that they're flipping the page to the really great part of their story.