Lara Bazelon s91 and I met for the first time in the sheep barn. Ella V and I had rushed down halfway through dinner after hearing that one of the last ewes was in labor. We arrived to a tense barn. The fading evening sun shone through the windows and the sheep were unusually quiet. The ewe had been in labor for a while; almost 40 minutes, Gwynne told us. It was time to intervene. Ella V and Lara watched from behind the bars as I held the sheep and Gwynne assisted the birth.

“I never saw this when I was here,” Lara commented. As a spring ‘91 semester alumni Lara experienced many of the same things that my semester is experiencing right now: dips in Derby pond, morning shares, evening games in the driveway, and April runs. Her semester even had four Toms, just like ours has four Ellas (yes, I’m one of them). But like the absence of lamb births, many things were also different. She described more physical changes, like the layout of Derby and the knocking down of the silo. With more students enrolled, we’ve had to cram more  people into dorms as well—Lara marveled at the unbelievably tiny Underwood quad. 

Back in her day the English class primarily read “dead New England writers and poets” she remarked. For better or for worse, our curriculum is now filled with a multitude of different voices: “Birches” by Robert Frost is paired with “One Word: Understand” by Chia-Chia Lin. I have yet to see an author’s name twice. As we continued to talk it became more clear that the values that shape our lives here in Vershire have stayed the same. “It’s about care for the community and care for the environment and I feel those kinds of issues cut across race, class, geography, everything,” she explained.

Aspects of identity and experience cannot be untangled from each other and from the current global issues we face. Lara talked about this in relation to our Environmental Humanities & Studies courses and climate change: “To not care about the climate is to not care about the future. The people who are most impacted by toxic waste, pollution, global warming, rising oceans are people who can't afford to get away from those problems.” The Mountain School taught Lara how to look for solutions on a communal scale. Now, as a public defender, she works for change one small community at a time. 

Lara stayed at TMS for a week, joining us for meals, Underwood check-ins, and puzzles after dinner. While she was here, she also taught a criminal justice workshop in AP US History. Her presence brought a new feel to this semester and her stories gathering students around the dining hall tables long after dinner had ended. There was the story when her sister came to visit and they got lost hiking and didn’t get back to campus until long after check in. There was the story of establishing her own firm and how she struggled to balance young voices while establishing her own expertise. Lara invited my semester to imagine how this place would change us going forward: how would we look back on this place? How might time make our memories fonder? While a lot of us have connections to more recent semesters, it was different to meet someone who came so long ago and glimpse how we will remember this experience long after high school and college. We are part of a lineage of Mountain School alumni, a fact that is evident in the signatures that pattern the desks and bureaus in all of the dorm rooms, but is often hard to fully internalize. There are so many people who lived in these beds, ate at these tables, and laughed in these walls.

Lara left on Friday night. She told me she had checked on the lamb (aptly named Ella; getting the count up to five) once more before leaving. “Our little baby is all grown up,” she laughed as she told me how he had been upgraded to kindergarten. She wished me the best for the rest of the semester and I told her I’d see her again at a reunion one day. We both know that this place always reappears in funny ways. As the mission statement reads, and like we’re frequently reminded, it is important to know a place and care for it. Lara showed us the importance in remembering a place as well.