Kimberly and I packed up the babies and hauled our soccer-mom-van, full of strollers and baby bags, down to Ephraim.
We drove down Main St. twice, once looking to the right, another time looking to the left before we pulled up on College Ave. to pass by the new on-campus apartments that filled up our once "magical field". Magical because it was where I got my first college kiss, watched the stars glisten on a still night, threw a football with the boys during the day and the time all my roommates and I blended in with the grass as security scanned their lights after 11, making sure everyone was in their dorms. Everyone but us, as we giggled under our star-gazing blankets, smooth lumps in the middle of the field, just out of reach of the head-lights.
The car looped around my sophomore apartment complex and I started bawling. My roommates had become my best friends that year and we had learned to love hard and fight hard for each other. Having dinners together every night really bonded us as a family as we always made extra for any significant others that wanted to join us. The boys that year were like family, coming and going, always with a few cookies or treats in hand and we were well protected, being the only girl apartment on the bottom floor with our choice of two boy apartments to hang out with that we became fast friends with.
The memories were so strong they were like shadows and I saw myself tossing a football for hours with a boy from Oregon. Barefoot, tan, short hair tucked behind my ear, throwing a ball with all my might through the middle stairwell of the complex. I got really good at throwing a football the last few weeks of that last semester.
The parking-lot to my freshmen dorms had been taken out and re-done, smoothing over the yellow lines that had housed the ugliest hippie van in all of the state of Utah. The very same van that, when I saw it, I died with embarrassment inside for the poor soul who had to drive it. And then found myself buckling into the passenger seat the very next week as a soon-to-be boyfriend took me to the store to pick up some foundation early Monday morning, as I was too insecure to go to class without makeup. They even covered up the stains that same boy had made when changing anti-freeze in his hippie van. Stains that have held fast to the towels we tried to use to mop it up, the ones that I still own and use for drying the cat after a bath.
We parked there and got out, buckling our strollers together for the toddlers and loading the third stroller with an infant and enough diapers, wipes and sippy-cups to last us three weeks. We hauled off, walking past the stretch of grass where I had held my first lacrosse stick and perfected the art of catching and throwing with a net.
Crossing the street we headed off for the middle of campus to check out the new library that had sprawled itself across the lawn we had used so many evenings for night-games. I ducked into the math building to go to the bathroom and as I entered the cool building I checked in on my old math classroom, making sure it still held the same breathtaking 'here we go again' feeling as I came to class every day and left having learned nothing other than what the football players that sat in-front of me had done over the weekend. I sneaked a peek into the math-lab (often, and with the best of feelings, called the meth-lab, as you never came out with a clear mind.). "My" table was still there, where "my" tutor had spent a hour a day with me, pouring over the homework from the class before. He was the only one who could make sense of my carefully taken, foreign notes and explain it back to me in plain English. Because of him I passed, with a C. My only C. Ever. And it was the hardest C I have ever earned, I can tell you that. The bathroom still smelled the same, that sweet smell of "this is a safe place" as I remember sitting on the second stall's toilet seat. Praying with all my heart to be able to have a clear mind for the final. The most powerfully hard hours of my life, and I smiled.
The library was awesome, as it should be, though what I had used the library for so many late nights it did not have. No student desks set up for silent studying. Everything was very 'group' designed. Glass rooms for group projects and studying, chairs pulled together in circles for discussions, seats joined by a side-table for texting, no desks to be seen. I don't think I would have spent much time there, beautiful as it was.
Concrete had replaced the fountain that had so often been the center of a practical joke. Bubbles, koi fish, food coloring, rubber ducks, they had all been placed in that fountain sometime within the two years I went to school at Snow. It's too bad. It was always the talk of campus and brightened everyone's mood as they walked past on their way to class, pausing a second to check out what was going on and taking the news on to class with them. It caused strangers to talk while waiting for the professor and allowed those of us who knew about it first-hand to share secret smiles with others.
The babies were sad and grumpy so we headed on back to the van, memories complete with a picture taken under the bell-tower with Alaska. Yes, The Bell Tower. And yes. I have been initiated into the True Badger Club. Twice. The rules are that you go to the Bell Tower on the full-moon at 12 o'clock midnight and kiss as the tower strikes twelve times. The first full-moon is the most talked about, but really, there aren't many people there. The last of the year, though, that one is so packed it's hard to get a spot underneath the tower and there are people kissing all over the sidewalk.
I walked away remembering. The best two years of my life. They were hard, stressful, emotional, and full of good, made all the more sweeter by the fight I had for those sweet memories. I have never grown so much in my life. The first two years of college, out on my own in the world, I grew up. Perhaps that is why missions are so often the best two years. So much growing, so much love, so much hard and so much good.
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