Miss Colbron, or Barbara as she asked me to call her, was Head of Spence from 1952 to 1970, and she recently turned 100 years old. On my way to Hanover, New Hampshire, to visit and salute her birthday, I remembered that she had generously called me on my very first or second day of headship to wish me the best. We had talked then about “our” school and how lucky we felt to have Spence in our lives. At that point, for me, it was all about imagination: for her, it was all about memory. This time, meeting in person, we would both have stories. I couldn’t wait.

We met for a late-afternoon tea, and Miss Margo Johnson, Interim Head of Spence from 1981 to 1983, also joined us. I came with gifts from our school. First she opened a picture of her in the Drawing Room probably taken in the ’50s, with four former faculty members sitting around her. After looking closely at it, she asked, “My goodness, is that really me?” Next I handed her a birthday card from alumnae from the ’60s, signed during a recent decades luncheon. “They had such lovely things to say about you,” I told her. “I wonder what they really think?” she quipped with a wide smile as she passed me the cookies. We talked about faculty, and Miss Johnson asked after some of the teachers whom she had hired. We talked about how much larger the Spence of today is when compared to the Spence of her days. We talked about teaching, leading and loving our work. We talked about how hiring good teachers is just about the most important thing we do. And they both laughed long and hard when I described some of the lighthearted themes of our recent All-School Assemblies. They were glad that we still found time for that sense of humor named by Clara Spence as a “requisite.” It was hard for me to pull away when it was time to go. It felt as if I were leaving something timeless and precious behind. Perhaps I was.

Later that evening I met six of our Dartmouth students for a casual dinner of too many fried things at Murphy’s on the Green. Two other alums were completing their semester abroad and couldn’t join us; the present group spanned from seniors to freshmen and from nearly four years at Dartmouth to nearly four months. But in their shared Spence membership you couldn’t really tell the difference, and at times it seemed as if we were all back at one of the Dining Room tables at Spence, talking. The conversation was alive with local and global issues: the complicated role of fraternities and sororities on campus, the status of women on campus and in the world, the current job market, favorite classes, hardest classes and brilliant teachers. I took delight in the realization that my presence was really just an excuse for their coming together, and most of the time I just sat back, listened and admired. There were many times during the dinner that I wished Barbara could have been there with me.

The juxtaposition of these two events was both illuminating and humbling. Did the world just get larger or smaller? Framed by what was and what is becoming, my time in Hanover made clear that strong schools are actually larger than the people in them, both collectively and individually. By being part of Spence, we are all part of something larger than self, and legacy will always mean both looking backwards and forwards. It cuts both ways, and in that wonderful gift of continuum, our school gets made and remade over and over again, generation by generation.

After dinner, I walked the girls to the corner and said goodnight under the streetlight. It was one of the first, cold evenings of the fall, and I told Emmy that she didn’t have a warm enough coat. I teased that I would tell her mother that. She said her mom would just be thankful that she wasn’t wearing flip-flops. The library across the green had all its lights on, and Marley was headed there to work on a big paper. Annabel was headed to the open-all-night studio to work on her sculpture. Sophie and Bella were headed to their single rooms to study. Kimberlee had studied all day and was headed towards an early bedtime for a change. As they crossed the street and walked away, I could still hear their fading laughter. I thought of Miss Colbron and I wondered if her picture with Spence teachers now lived on her bureau. I remembered again that wonderful quotation from Clara Spence about our school being “a place not of mechanical instruction, but a school of character and manners where the common requisites for all have been human feeling, a sense of humor and the spirit of intellectual and moral adventure,” and thought again about how we are all fellow travelers, young and old alike, in that same self adventure we call Spence.

Click here to view a photo gallery of Bodie’s visit with Miss Colbron and Miss Johnson.