In my bones...

Today's the first day of service week for my old colleagues, and I've been thinking about the day's routine for them, and all the new staff faces there may be. I've got issues with the place, or rather I should say that I didn't always agree with the school's attitude and approach... but as I was saying to my colleagues back in June--which seems like yesterday--I've got that place in my bones, and I can't get rid of it. Whenever I think about improvement, and about building, and contributing to good, I inevitably think abut the place.

August is the time for me, as I'm sure it is for many teachers, where the potential of the year seems so limitless, and everything seems so doable--if we only plan enough...

Anyway, I was remembering this passage from Hawthorne, because of it's beautiful, and because it sort of describe how I feel about my old school:

This old town of Salem my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame, its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other, such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the
deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.