An astonishingly long time ago I left a tiny island of 700 people and went to college in a city of half a million. I fell in love with that city the very first time I visited it, despite the January weekend's freezing rain and the overwhelming gray that colored all of Boston often in the winter. But as a freshman there, I also joined their outing club, the acronym for which was NUHOC, to get away from the cement and out of the chaos. About once a month, we left for the mountains of New Hampshire or Vermont, the lakes of New York, and a few times, the shores of Maine. We drove in huge, nonaerodynamic, white vans that occasionally broke down and left us stranded in fields for hours at a shot, to sleep on the warm grass, or to talk to other kids we had maybe met that very day, or to sit on rocks and just think in silence (this, thankfully, before the days of cell phones and immediate distraction or connection). We slept in tents that sometimes leaked rainwater in the middle of the night all around our mats. We made camp fires that frequently led to us not going to bed until 4 a.m. despite needing to pile back into those large white vans for Boston at 6 a.m. I'm generally not attached to material things, but this pint glass says Brown Memorial Lodge 1971-1996. It was NUHOC's lodge's 25th anniversary, and my 2nd year at school, and I'm a little sad that the print is fading now. Those NUHOC trips, from the ages of 18-23, years straddling imminent adult responsibility and past teenage restrictions, were some of the most memorable trips I ever took. The years when being stuck in a field for hours or lying on rocks on a hill in the sunshine with no ability to call anyone, no ability to get out, and no actual concern about that are few. I'm glad they happened. I may need to stop putting this glass in the dishwasher.