Yes, I graduated. I earned my ring--it's on my finger now, the ring finger of my right hand. My wedding ring occupies my left. Which finger a person wears the green ring on varies--Charlie wears his on his left, a personal symbol of who and what he's married to. So does Greg, incidentally. I've never been clear on whether Greg is formally celibate, but he at least sized his ring with the expectation that he'd never marry. Anyway, it feels a bit strange to wear this, to have it and everything it means in common with Charlie and Greg and the others.
When the Brigid ceremony ended, I processed off the stage with the other masters (!) without clearly knowing where we were going. We ended up in a classroom just outside of the Chapel. Charlie closed the door and looked at the five of us newbies with a mischievous glint.
"Anybody wanna know what we do after that ceremony?" he said. We didn't quite shout "me! me!" like pre-schoolers, but that was the mood in the room.
"We're going to bless the sugar maple trees," he explained. "And the trees generally, all of them on campus. And it's gonna be cold, so if you want to go back to your dorms to get an extra layer, I'd get going. Meet us in the Formal Gardens."
"I've never seen new masters in the dorms Brigid night," said Raven, sounding a little uncertain. Wanting to keep to the proper ritual of it all, I suppose.
"That's why you've got to go now," Charlie explained. "While they're all eating." The students all have a small feast in the Chapel itself after the ceremony, rather than going back to the Great Hall to eat together. Now I know why.
"I was out walking most of the day," I said. "And I was fine. Has it gotten a lot colder while we've been in here?"
Charlie shook his head. Of course he'd been inside just as we had, but I accepted his authority on the subject, and it only took me a moment to figure out how he knew; it had been clouding up earlier. Cloudy skies trap heat at night. If the clouds had cleared so quickly, it could only have been a front moving through, and even in the Chapel, we would have heard the wind.
What it takes is not only noticing things, but finding them significant enough to think about, think through.
We all decided we were warm enough, and so we and the other masters all followed Charlie out. He seemed to be in charge, a role I don't normally see him play among the masters, but there he was. He carried a bag with him.
We went, not to the Formal Garden, which had been simply a convenient semi-private meeting place near the dorms, but to the avenue of sugar maples along the main entrance way.
Those trees were planted long ago as a stately avenue, two single-file rows of trees, but now they are simply the oldest members of a small grove that Charlie has allowed to grow from their seedlings. Some of them are getting pretty big. He opened his bag and handed out thermoses of something--syrup-sweetened herbal tea, I think, nothing alcoholic--and led us through a small ceremony in which we sang to the trees and drank toasts to them. We then went down the avenue and more briefly toasted every single one that is large enough for us to tap. Of course, the sugaring season, the first harvest of the year, is about to begin.
At the end of the avenue we raised yet another toast to the whole group. Then we set off on a circuit of the campus as Charlie took us to visit and greet one representative member of each woody species on campus.
It took a long time, and yes, we got cold. The whole affair would probably have been more festive if we'd had alcohol to drink, frankly, but at least the tea was hot, and as we got hungrier and hungrier, and eventually more and more tired, we all got giddy and goofy stone cold sober.
Each tree had its own verse of our song, plus a repeating chorus, and there were special words to say for the toasts, and all of it seemed very new and a little complicated to the five of us, but I can see how all of it could become as easy and natural-seeming as any holiday tradition.
And when we'd at last visited every representative tree on campus, we stood in the snow near the edge of the world and sang the whole song through, beginning to end, dancing a complicated circle dance that seemed designed to accommodate a few dancers who didn't know what they were doing.
Then, standing there under a thick, cloudy sky, panting a little in the cold air and wondering what would come next, I heard Charlie speak:
"Anyone else half-frozen here, or is it just me?"
We all admitted we were, indeed, frozen.
"Then let's get the hell inside."
For some reason that was really funny. Allen gaffawed. Karen giggled. The rest of us various tittered and smirked. And so, laughing, we stumbled back to the Mansion, went up the secret stair, and into the masters' dorm where Mia--who had not gone out to wassail the trees with us--had a feast prepared. We had hot chocolate, roasted nuts, pancakes with maple syrup and fruit preserves, eggnog, and, finally once we were warm again, peppermint-flavored ice cream with more syrup and nuts and fruit. The milk for all this came, I am told, from canned evaporated milk put up from our own sheep the year before. We were deliberately finishing up the last of our dairy, our egg, and our maple syrup to demonstrate our trust that in the coming new year, we'd get more.
June was there. She'd been invited up because family of masters have the same access masters do. Actually, Lo, Kit's husband, of course Cuppa Joe, and various sprouts were there, too, including my small relatives (my brother and sister-in-law were not, though they were invited--they had something else to do and had dropped the kids off with Lo for the sleep-over). It was a big party, and all of us stayed up very late, even the sprouts.
There was a room full of bunk beds. Allen explained that we could sleep there whenever we visited campus.
"This is your place, now. You can come and go as you like, and you can bring whomever you like, except students. You can tell anything to anybody you like, use your judgment. It's just as good as ours, now. You're us."
"We trust you," added Charlie.
The next morning, June and I moved our stuff upstairs and I stood in my room there in my student dorm for a long time, saying goodbye to it. We have an apartment picked out already and our paperwork is signed. Our move-in day is Thursday.
That afternoon, at lunch (back in the Dining Hall, with yet another generation of newly-arrived yearlings milling around with their buddies looking confused) Charlie invited me upstairs to his room to have a drink. The drink turned out to be plain water, of course.
I sat on the edge of his bed, which looks like and probably is a used exam table from a doctor's office or a physical therapy place, hard and narrow, and he sat in a swivel chair by his desk. We talked, though not of anything of obvious import. We were just hanging out.
After a while, he picked up his tin whistle from his desk and started fidgeting idly with it.
"I have mine here," I commented. "It's with my stuff in the other room."
"What can you play?" he asked.
I shrugged.
"I don't know. Anything, if I learn it, I suppose."
And so I fetched my tin whistle, and he taught me to play a duet version of "Uncle John's Band."
The same song Allen had strummed on his guitar for us on the secret beach when I was a yearling, so long ago.
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Here ends my story, though not this blog. I have an Afterward, of sorts, explaining what happened to lead me to start this blog in the first place and generally getting you up to date. I'm not sure how many posts it will take to cover the material, perhaps three or four, maybe more. It won't be episodic in structure--events played out over months, not weeks, and I was rarely on campus. In any case, stay tuned.
-D.
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