Five years ago if you told me I’d leave the last cheap house in Mt. Shasta to move to the east coast, especially to attend some expensive, private little liberal arts college for women in western Massachusetts, I would have laughed at you. But then I became a semi-finalist for a massive scholarship. When that happened, I started getting emails from schools like Harvard and Yale, encouraging me to apply.
There had been some moments after I went back to school when I felt a bit sad, because I thought that small, extraordinarily expensive liberal arts schools were out of my reach, even with a scholarship. I had an established life: a daughter, pets, a home, a community and besides, the kind of world I suspected of Ivies like Yale & Harvard held no interest for me.
But then Smith College came calling, and I could no longer say that I wasn’t interested. Smith was one of those extraordinarily expensive, small liberal arts schools – in fact it was THE extraordinarily expensive, small liberal arts school, of my dreams. And so, heck with it, I decided to fill out the application. Admittedly, I originally applied just to see if I could get in, because moving my child and I out of our home, finding family to take on our furry friends, and hauling us both across the country really just seemed out of the question, but when the acceptance letter came back, along with a financial aid package that basically covered everything except my move across the country, there was no way I could turn that down. I decided to accept the invitation to become an Ada Comstock Scholar at Smith College and Abundant Content moved east.
Thus, here we are in campus family housing here in Northampton, Massachusetts – a LOOOOOOOONG way from our mountain home in Mt. Shasta, California. I now have daily conversations with professors, writers, and others that I simply can’t believe I have access to. They are responding to my emails. I miss my alpine mountain paradise but for the moment, this is a good place to be and there’s a lot of opportunity, provided I can find affordable housing when I’m finished here.
I had to put Abundant Content on pause for a while so I could get my footing here, and now that I’m back I’m focusing more on writing and copyediting (and maybe some WordPress) because those are the things I enjoy the most.
So, that’s the news. Abundant Content moved east. I’m an American Studies major with a concentration in community engagement and social change. This means, mostly, that I read a lot and write a lot of papers about culture and history and intersectionality and stuff like that. All the way up my alley.
