Lessons in the Present Tense

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” Wordsworth once wrote. “But to be young was very heaven.” As an undergraduate at Smith, it was like that every day—the kind of bountiful spirit that comes when everything is possible so that it seems there really is, beyond the brightly lit curtain of life, some more radiant explanation that makes sense of it all. It was a time to fall in love with questions before we had to live our way to the answers, when time dulls even the tenderest of souls.

I remembered this in the spring of 2023, when I came back to campus as a visiting lecturer in the English department to teach The Literature of Fact, a workshop on nonfiction narrative writing. It was 50 years after I’d matriculated at Smith. I revisited my old memories, walking the paths that took me to classes at Seelye on crisp fall mornings—past the sweet-smelling hyacinth near Wright Hall in the spring, or home in the winter gloaming to the bright yellow beacon of Haven House. There is something stubborn, though, about memories that yield longing but remain inert, vivid, and yet somehow motionless. Nonetheless, here I was, surrounded by boundless filling hearts.

My students were exceptional. They vibrated with energy and tackled their writing assignments with enthusiasm. Too much, sometimes. One week, I asked the class to find a spot anywhere on campus and write about it using all their senses. One zealous student came back and admitted that in writing about the brick façade of Bass Hall, she felt compelled to taste the ivy! It was a sensation, thankfully, she will likely not repeat, and for me a lesson in linguistic imprecision. I loved her ebullience, though, and was reminded of how intrepid Smith students were, are. They poured their hearts and minds out to me in their writing, sometimes fraught, often glorious, all of it streaming with a kind of grace that only comes from feeling and living the newness of the world, with its losses and surprises both.

I wrote about one of those moments—my own moment—years ago for Sports Illustrated, where I started my journalism career as a fact-checker. It was a reminiscence about my final rowing practice on the Smith crew team and how I took a snapshot in my mind that day so I would remember it always—the warmth of the sun on the water and in my heart for these friends, this place, and the grace that had brought us all there.

Then in 2023, 27 years after that piece ran in SI, I was asked by Smith rowing coach Clare Doyle to come out on the water in the launch for practice—but only after first reading the story to the team. It ends with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that in our youth, our hearts are touched with fire. They were. They are. It was a strange experience, moving back and forth in time from that moment in the spring of ’77 to when I wrote the piece 14 years later. Reading it to a new generation of rowers five decades after it happened, I felt the full splendor of three moments in time coming together while the ripples of the Connecticut lapped the shore.

Whenever I teach, I tell students we are all just the sum of our stories. Stories organize our days, define the contours of our relationships, and vivify our dreams. Nothing gold can stay, as Robert Frost once wrote, but in the time each of us is allotted, we spin our own gold threads into the story of our lives. There is no great transcendental notion behind the screen that separates us from the unknown—just us, here and now. Our memories are like musical notes shaped by the silence on the other side: They take form from what comes after, and without which we’d have no reason to reminisce. But I do it now with luster, knowing how young I felt—not in 1973, but in 2023. And even now, in my 70th year, remembering the voices of my students, I feel surrounded by what has always made Smith special—not the houses or the flowers or the food, or even the lessons of learning, but the stories of who we are, or were, on our way to being old.

I took many pictures when I walked around campus that spring—the giant oak behind Washburn, diadems of the first frost decorating the grass, the Grécourt Gates swung open in invitation—sometimes to keep track of time passing, like how long it took for the 5-foot-high mound of snow to finally disappear in front of my Pierce Hall office. And at nearly every moment, the years tumbled from my grasp—splinters of memory, beautiful and shimmering in their evanescence, now mingling, impossibly, with these new ones.

I wanted my students to understand that everything was passing too fast for them, as it did for me once, and that they needed to take a breath every now and then, to hold on to the moments that mattered, even the smallest ones. To illustrate my point, I read them a short poem by Mary Oliver, which ends with these lines: 

Our touching, our stories. Earthly 
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in it
whose name is forever.

Every time we met for class that spring, each student came in with a “forever moment” from the preceding week to share with the rest of us—a slice of conversation overheard in the quad, the pitter-patter of dinnertime laughter, the blueness of the sky while lying next to a friend on Chapin lawn.

They understood, better than I ever had, that every day has a memory that can’t be taken away. They will be old someday too, but they can embrace their ghosts when it’s time. Yes, that’s what I wanted them to know. To be young or old, as long as we were there, together, once and forever, at Smith. Oh yes, it was very heaven.

Amy Ellis Nutt ’77 is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Her fourth book, American Madness, will be published next year by Random House.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Smith Quarterly.