envelope– “a flat paper container with a sealable flap, used to enclose a letter or document.”

Seemingly innocuous strips of processed trees, a bit of adhesive (typically used in the particularly unsanitary work of licking the envelope closed), some clever folding and you have an envelope… one of some thousand–trillion- bajillion that crawl through the U.S. Postal Service every day. However, there are a few envelopes in everyone’s life that matter quite a bit. It’s that sensitive time of year for the seniors as they anticipate whether their envelopes will be joyously bulky, denoting the happy college news inside, or if they will suffer the thin envelope. Prospective Thacher students also received their own envelopes and now some are returning to the school for second visits in order to make their final decision.

Recently, I received an envelope of my own. In fact, I had been anticipating this particular envelope for a very long time. One could say that I had been waiting for it since I first heard of the School Year Abroad program even before my freshman year at Thacher. Since that time, I sent many envelopes to this program, full of teacher recommendations and essays. I read on their website in early January that the applicants would discover their fate on April 3rd…. it felt a long way away… anyways, I tried to forget about it and just wait. The forgetting didn’t really work and then I didn’t have a choice in the waiting part. So, on March 20th when a large envelope arrived at my house addressed to my parents with the familiar blue SYA symbol in the upper left hand corner, I FLIPPED OUT! I remember I was bringing in groceries from the car and I just left them on the sidewalk with the trunk of the car open in order to open it. And THANK GOODNESS it was gloriously thick with a binder inside and all kinds of happy, congratulatory words. So, basically, the punch line of this story is that

I AM GOING TO FRANCE FOR A YEAR!!

My junior year will be spent with a French host family in Rennes– living, eating, and breathing French. I feel very honored that I received a happy envelope, but I can only begin to try to understand the difficulty of the alternative. After living with both possibilities during my waiting period, I can commiserate with everyone who has gone through this unique form of torture known commonly by its euphemism the application process.

To anyone who is waiting for his or her own envelope right now: I wish you a juicy, giant envelope of smiles and rainbows…and if the case is not so propitious, I hope you think of this anecdote. Some famous writer that I can’t remember the name of wrote back to a reviewer that panned him, “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house with your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”