Senior Reflection: Elizabeth Catizone
“I make so many beginnings there never will be an end.”
– Laurie Lawrence, Little Women.
In Exeter English classes, beginnings are meant to be more abrupt than endings. To earn the highest number of points for an introduction, the rubric always specified that the piece should begin in medias res, in the midst of things. I always wondered how it was possible not to write in medias res, because any story I ever chose to write for English was based on life, and life always seems to be in the midst of things, suspended somewhere between many beginnings.
As I have already failed a section of the rubric, I hope you’ll allow me to try again.
I stopped. My finger paused on my cracked phone screen. I stopped scrolling through an art account on Instagram to open the year-old caption, written by one of last year’s seniors. She listed off things she loved, many of them relating to Exeter, and she invited others to leave their lists in the comments. Her writing filled me with profound gratitude, and some lines moved me almost to tears. I felt inspired to write my own, but thought better of leaving it in the comments. After all, I was seeing this post a year late, and I’d only shared two classes with her. I still wished I could share my list though, because if it had a fraction of the effect on someone that her list had on me, it was worth putting into the world.
I love the big magnolia tree at the corner of Wheelwright and I love my ornithology field trips. I love when it’s 3:33 pm or 11:11 am, and all the other times of the day when the numbers line up on the clock as if it were a winning slot machine. I love sitting on J. Smith quad with my friends while the sun makes my hair feel hot to the touch. I love the way the sunsets smile over EPAC in all seasons, but especially so in spring. I love the way that people who I’ve only had class with once still say hi to me around campus. I love the ocean and reading books that aren’t for class. I love being intermittently quiet and quite talkative around the people I love. I love making and seeing art. I love the way the trees form a latticed tunnel over the path by Dunbar. I love my family and my friends. I love the art, music, and science buildings. I love molasses cookies with turbinado sugar on top. I love people who laugh often and genuinely. I love sitting on Swasey and seeing the cormorants perched with their wings spread on the mooring buoys and the enthralled way that the toddlers watch the crew boats come into the dock on farmer’s market Thursdays. I love beginnings. I love teachers who take time to talk about life at the beginning of each class. I love making toast with goat cheese, strawberries, and honey. I love the well-worn trails. I love how I’ve grown up here.
At first, I doubted my teachers when they told me Exeter would come to feel like home. I doubted them in prep fall, in the midst of the pandemic, when I could only barely be on-campus, either outside or in the library. I doubted them again in lower winter, upper spring, and senior fall, when my coursework and commitments overwhelmed me. But I’ve come to understand that home isn’t only a place to rest and relax, and just because I’m home doesn’t mean everything will be easy. Home isn’t in the present tense forever. You can leave. I am. But I believe that I have left a piece of myself in every place I’ve called home: perhaps a dropped pencil, a strand of hair, a slight groove on the step. I hope that somewhere here, there remains something of mine. That would only be fair because I am taking so much of Exeter with me.
Although the weeks leading up to graduation look like an ending, I trust that beginnings are budding all around me, as long as I give them the attention they need to grow.
