Franklin Pierce University, Rindge, N.H


…Walking across the frozen lake and meeting new friends on the ice, getting a bloody nose boxing secretly with gloves in a back room, seeing Simon again after so long, watching deer scurry through the field above the school and geese meander across its wide lawns, sharing a moment of honest conversation with good friends, struggling to get an A in class…

These are things I remember now about Franklin Pierce, looking back from yesterday to the first time I walked onto campus as a student, months ago. When I am greying and aged, I wonder what I shall remember about this university. Will I idolize the good times and expand them so that they cover all, the memories like a think blanket of snow lying over a slum? Shall I dwell constantly on the dark, seeing only monotony, boredom and stress?

I hope not…

I hope that I have the good fortune to remember both, to balance this grand experience in my mind and examine it for both the positive and negative. I would like to look back and see with clarity, recall the snowstorms that buffeted our tiny community and brought us somehow closer together by necessity, the dear friends who went out of their way to help me, the fights and arguments but also the banter and laughing which are equal parts of this place.

Mostly though, if I could choose what to be able to remember, it is the other students. The good and bad, the perpetually drunk and the always sober, the shambolic and the organized, the hyperactive and the quite boring, they all weave together into a tapestry of balance that lends F.P.U the positive and negative memories I am constantly assailed with even now.

If I could, I would remember their faces…

(Robbie, Daria and Jess)

(Walking On the Frozen Lake with the girls)

(Lauren)

(Daria)

(Pam)

(Cooper)

(Dan)

(Lads)

(Bobert)

(Cooper)

(Trouble)

(University on Ice)