Only to Be Here

The Friday of reunion weekend, while friends were boarding flights and getting in cars to make their way to Wellesley, I was also heading to campus—but I was wrestling my 16-month-old into his car seat before rushing to the Wellesley Community Children’s Center and then my office in Green Hall. For me, May 2025 marked two Wellesley milestones: my 15th reunion as an alum and my four-year anniversary as an employee.

This reunion was a decade in the making. I was devastated when our 10-year gathering was canceled by COVID, and I dreamed of finally getting to hug those old friends, drink beers in the radio station, sit by the lake at night, dance my “class off,” and wear as much purple as possible. When I started working at the College in 2021—a job I applied for, in part, because I had missed returning to campus in 2020—my 15th reunion fantasies started to include swiping my friends into Green Hall late at night and giving them golf-cart rides, using my staff status to show off a new side of Wellesley. But when reunion arrived, I found myself not so excited.

Most of the time, I love my job. I’m a senior editorial writer for the College’s department of communications and public affairs, and I love talking to Wellesley students, faculty, staff, and alums about their passions and writing about them for Wellesley’s website and this magazine.

But it isn’t always sunshine and rhododendrons. As one fellow alum colleague put it, you care more about your work because it’s for a place you love—but it’s exhausting to be so emotionally invested. It also changes how you see things: It’s like visiting the kitchen of your favorite restaurant. It makes you look at the menu a little differently.

As my friend group chat blew up discussing outfits for the parade, I felt torn—I was excited to see my friends, but I knew I’d also be working reunion on top of celebrating, and I was so, so tired and not looking forward to spending all weekend at my place of employment.

But, as it turned out, in between advancing slides backstage at the College Update and Awards event and driving around alums from the class of 1965, I couldn’t help smiling. Every alum seemed thrilled to be back, and some friends were reuniting for the first time since 2015. There was no taking this weekend for granted.

After I finished work on Saturday, I found my friends in Tower’s dining hall. It was 2007 all over again, a lingering weekend brunch, the days feeling endless. That afternoon we drank beers in the radio station; that night, we drank beers by the lake. Walking to Waban in the dark, my friend Cary stopped in the middle of Tupelo Lane, throwing her arms out. “Look at this place! How lucky were we?” she said.

Something clicked. I’d been thinking of reunion as being “stuck at work” all weekend; I’d forgotten it also meant spending time at one of my favorite places in the world. Sitting by the lake that night, we watched bats swoop and a muskrat swim, heard geese honking, saw a heron soaring. I was reminded of a memory from spring 2010: walking back to Claflin one foggy evening when a family of deer materialized and silently moved across Severance Green. I felt the magic of the campus intensely in that moment: a beautiful haven in a dark world. I had that feeling again the Saturday night of reunion, sitting by the lake with some of my favorite people.

After four years at any job, it’s easy to be jaded. It had become easy to see Wellesley as just the place where I work. But when Cary threw out her arms, I remembered. Every day I look for the moments that are special, the things that I love, all the best things about Wellesley. How lucky am I, to get to write about this place?