Welcome to the article, my children. Well, here we are. The bell tolls on another year at Whitman. The slow frivolous days of summer are slipping away into fall, and the pitter-patter of first-year feet decks the halls. Yet this year we received an unexpected gift: an extra week of summer and the full enjoyment of Labor Day. It seemed almost too good to be true.

And isn’t it? As we fell into our usual routine — book buying, syllabi receiving — we could feel that something was not quite right. We are struck by the sense that we are so young, yet so old, at the same time. As the weeks go by, we feel the echo of who we might have been had everything been different. Had we just started school one week earlier. I am naught but a ship on the sea, waving at another ship with the ghost of who I was, who I would have been. Goodbye, little ghost. May God protect your soul.

Nay, perhaps this is only noticeable to one who is a senior, who has done this same song and dance so many times that any shift in the force would be perceptible. Surely, a first-year would have nothing to compare it with. 

Yet, but look a little closer. Can you feel it? The way the dogs bark at night, as if they’re angry at the moon? The murder of crows flapping across the sky. Could it be an omen? A portent, be it mal or bene, of things to come? Yes, I daresay you can feel it. The shift in the air. Something is at work here, something that neither you nor I could possibly understand. Only time will tell the ways in which our lives are forever changed.