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‘Tis the time of year again for the purchasing of school supplies, also known as one of my favorite holidays. There is no specific date for this holiday, and the exciting thing is that it can last multiple days and involve lots of labeling and organizing and putting things into bags. (Yep, sounds like a lot of other holidays, right?)

I’ve been wondering if the excitement about peeling back the packaging from a new set of pens or notebooks will ever go away. No, no I don’t think it ever will.

I still get excited about picking out my first day of school outfit, that fresh start, laying out my clothes the night before. Then there’s the not sleeping because I’m afraid I’ll over sleep. Does anyone else do this? As one of my ambassador duties, I recently began tweeting about my experience in the Creative Writing – Nonfiction MFA Program, and I have noticed a similar theme of excitement among kindred spirits on both Twitter and Facebook who are just as excited about school as I am.

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It felt good to be back in class with the nine original classmates from my cohort. We started this program two years ago, all nervous energy and pristine notebooks, and last Tuesday, sitting in class, I got this overwhelming sense of nostalgia, remembering Wes Jamison to my left and Toni Nealie sitting across from me and oh my goodness how nervous we all were when Jenny Boully walked into the room. As I prepped for teaching last Wednesday and neatly stacked my students’ supplementary reading (books introduced to me by my graduate professors) in a separate “semester” stack on my bookshelf, I thought about my students and fellow instructors and wondered, again, is anyone else feeling this way, getting so excited.

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Speaking of excitement, yep, that’s me on my first day of Kindergarten, strolling into school all proud with my backpack and red and white shirt (I have no clue what’s on that shirt or why I’m wearing it). The cropping on the photo is weird; it’s blurry, but hey, it was the 80s, and yes, the sun is in my face, and I look like I am in pain, but really, I am damn excited for this day. I think about this photo every year when I return to school, about the nostalgia that that moment holds for me, the way that photo brings back the sound of pencils getting sharpened, the smell of shavings, the feel of a paper-cut from loose-leaf notebook paper, the way glue always managed to creep up under my nails, and how I always wanted the cool purple Fiskar scissors but somehow always ended up with blue. As I made my way through Amazon, trying to find the best deals on my books for this semester, I was nostalgic for those memories, that return to Kindergarten, to that photo of me, slightly awkward, sashaying my way into what would become over twenty years of education. That excitement still exists, and I feel it more than ever during that first week before grad school and especially this year, leading into my final year of grad school. And, I can’t help but to think that perhaps, just maybe, this might have been my last first day of school.