Over the summer, my daughter, Cora, then 9, attended her first sleepaway camp. When I picked her up in Marin County after five days, we were both filled with the emotion of our reunion—it had been her longest time away from home and family. “How much longer?” she asked with increasing frequency during our return trip to Stanford.
Just past Crystal Springs Reservoir, Highway 280 peaks and then bends left, descending through acres of golden grasses and on toward the Dish. I asked her to look out the window. “Do you recognize where we are?” She peered out, then emitted a cry of longing. By the time we turned onto Campus Drive, it had become a chant: “Home. Home. Home! HOME!”
Cora has lived as a resident fellow kid in frosh dorms since she was 1. She’s connected—for richer and for poorer—to the land and its inhabitants: the coast live oaks she climbed during the pandemic shutdown; the Lake Lag coyote pack that absconded with her beloved brown tabby, Kuma; the annual summer pilgrimage of ants into every campus kitchen. (Unlike her mother, she’s not alarmed by the rats who scuttle through Arroyo’s RF patio. But the ants!)
I’d thought of Stanford as a thing I was sharing with my children, but I realized it is something they are sharing with me.
Likewise, she’s bound to its people—notably, college students. She has joined their Halloween costume competitions and hidden Easter candy for them in the lounge. She’s eaten dining hall chicken drumsticks beside them since she could hold one up. Year after year, Cora has set up tables on the sidewalk to sell her wares—at first, friendship bracelets, then homemade artwork, and eventually Girl Scout cookies and fresh lemonade. If you ever wonder about Gen Z, I can assure you that they are kind: They patronize little kids’ shops like there’s nowhere else they’ve got to be.
I, on the other hand, have a hard time answering the question of where I am “from.” My parents—and ancestors—are most assuredly Missourian. By the time I was Cora’s age, I’d lived in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina. I’d grown fond of limestone cliffs but also loblolly pines; any friendships built to last did so by letter. In adulthood, I added four more states to my tally. Where can I lay claim to? I’ve now lived at Stanford a collective 13 years—longer than anywhere—and built a family here, biological and otherwise. Can I call it mine? Will it have me?
In that moment Cora cried out—it had to be the pitch of her voice, or perhaps its honesty—I was filled with a realization. Cora is from here. She knows no other place in this way, in the way that your body calls out for the land when you’re not with it, in the way that the bend of the road and the color of the grass and the familiar line of trees signals to your subconscious to relax and release and be enveloped by their welcome. Up to that day, I’d thought of Stanford as a thing I was sharing with my children, but I realized it is something they are sharing with me. Of course, none of us ever really owns the land on which we’re living—we are but travelers here, the saying goes. And yet this place grounds us, my daughter and me, in a way no other place now can, and it connects us to each other, and to all of you.
Jill Patton, ’03, MA ’04, is the senior editor for Stanford. Email her at jillpatton@stanford.edu.
