It started when the weather abruptly switched from mid-summer to late-autumn in the course of a day, and I opened the rubbermaid of winter clothes to find my favorite sweater. The rubbermaid, which I had packed back in our first apartment, washed a wave of memories over me: it smelled like home. It smelled like our closet, which was luxuriously huge. It smelled like our first night in our first home, as we laid spellbound in the dark at the simple wonder and potential of finally having a place that was ours, and ours alone.

My sweater still smelled like all of that sentimentality as I tugged it over my head on my way to choir rehearsal early on the morning of the Woods homecoming. Soft, purple, and emblazoned with the college name in all of its thirty-one character glory, it enveloped me in the snug, first-cold-morning-of-classes way it did all through college.

It wasn't just the sweater that embraced me with the familiar college student feeling: the prickly heat of the Cecelian stage lights, the choir posture, the smell of the Conservatory inside when it rains, the front seat of my best friend's car, the barn, the horses, the dorm rooms, the way the wet grass made me regret wearing canvas shoes, the laughter around the table, the faculty and staff hugs, the sound of the noon church bells---

At the sound of the noon bells ringing from the Big Church, time stopped. Standing there in the wet grass in my soggy shoes, with a choir folder in my hand and my friends around me, it was like I had never left. I had never wanted to leave. My heart wanted nothing more than to be a student again.

Until I saw my husband walking across the road toward us, grinning in his own SMWC sweatshirt. The boy that I dragged across the Wabash River bridge to every event, and study night turned into a Woods staff member, walking through the campus as easily and joyfully as I do. It is his Woods now, too.

In that moment, a circle was completed. Like a soft, green shoot from the remains of a fallen acorn, another beautiful beginning was leaping from the sentimental, precious closing of a beautiful beginning that started those few, but far away years ago when I leaned over to my boyfriend on my first visit day and whispered: "I'm coming here, and I'm going to get into that choir." Little did I know how much of our life would be shaped by that day.

I was back to the beginning-- this time surrounded by all the love and hope that had been given to me in little blessings all along the way. The people I love, the places I have lived, the things I have held dear, smells and the sights and the sounds, the dreams I carried, the plans I made, the past and the future, all spread around me in a full, full circle, shaped by the Hand of Providence.

A circle called Home.