A New Mountain Day!

A photo from the top of our Mountain Day lunch spot, taken by 8th grader Laila

In some ways every day for a year and a half has been a mountain day.  We have climbed and climbed a steady hill with a lot of, shall we say, exertion? during this pandemic.  But today, finally, it was the REAL Mountain Day. "It's like in the old days,” some of our students said. Indeed, we had not celebrated Mountain Day since "the old days."

This time-honored Center School tradition is where, on a beautiful fall morning after a few frosts have zapped the bees’ nests and mosquitos, students hike up the hill behind our school in mixed-aged partnerships, with teachers and administrators in tow, to a lovely picnic destination. We eat, chat, play and then return to school for a delicious, well-earned period of rest and reflection.  

This year, the hill is new because we’ve moved. It’s also new because we have so many new kids!  This caused some nervous excitement for a lot of us as we embarked from the traffic circle.  But in just 10 minutes, walking up the most welcoming, gold-dappled trail with this community of hardy souls, I felt a fantastic wave of relief and calm. There was no need to be anywhere but exactly in that present moment, surrounded by children’s voices and crunching leaves, laughing at knock knock jokes... “Knock, knock! Who’s there? Interrupting Pirate. Interrupting Pirate wh--- Arrrrgh!”... catching snippets of sweet conversation between buddies... “When I was a Prime, I felt like the Upper buddies were so big and so old.  Now that I’m an Upper, I realize I feel just like a Prime!”... stopping to help someone with a shoelace or a backpack… snapping a picture in my mind, and on my phone, to remind me of this day, how great it was, and how far we’ve come.

Happy Mountain Day, 

Charlie Spencer

Head of School