Become … Becoming

I observed them for 40 years.  Sometimes I was able to get up close, to be able to befriend them.  But just when we were getting comfortable with each other, they’d be gone, replaced by others and the taming had to start all over again.  Their seasons became mine.  They would arrive at the end of the summer, unsteady and disoriented, wary and nervous.  By autumn they would have learned the habits of their elders, ways of surviving, of staying safe, of digging in and making a place for themselves.  They would generally find their way into little packs, coming and going together, enjoying each other.  They would become noisier, their movements more pronounced.  Winter would slow them down, their coats would thicken.  Spring was fun to watch, because they would shed their coats, show early stages of mating behavior, and resume their group noises, similar to those in their mid-fall groups but much louder, and more movement.  Watching them made me smile.

But about this time every year watching them took me to a deep part of myself.  I would watch as the things they often carried on their backs became heavier.  Now they seemed to be changed by these things, to be slowed down and quieted.  The groups began to break into pairs and individuals, and their scurrying become more purposeful.  The week before they would disappear was always hard for me, because I knew that they would be gone for a few months, and that about a fourth of them would not return, replaced by new ones.  After a few years, I’d learned to distinguish the ones who would not return, and tears would come to my eyes sometimes just watching them. I began to notice, year after year, how they had grown, had filled out, had become more confident, more beautiful. 


These last weeks that they were around had a certain reverence, a deep quiet, as they seemed to climb into themselves, when the season’s activity and noise and coming and going seemed to become muscle and bone, seemed to be the times that they would …become.  This time of year was the time of this intense becoming, that inspired them, and eventually called them away.  At graduation I would watch them in their caps and gowns, their final bright colors, their final gathering, winding across their paths, all together now, these older ones who would be disappearing.  I would remember some of them, who they had been in their furtive freshman year, and who they had … become.  But the time that moved me most, year after year, was these two weeks before exams were over and they disappeared, when the campus resonated with this quiet, insistent sound of becoming.

For them, the campus provided this place of becoming.  What was it for you?  What is it?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.