TA News

By Benjamin Barton ’29

As I beat the pair of spoons in my hand against my knee, I took a moment to look around the enormous dining hall made entirely of pretty pine wood. With a total of 20 tables, each able to seat 12 people, and lights strung up around the pillars holding up the roof beams, it was nothing short of magnificent. 

I glanced at my friend, who was still working away at the massive pile of food on his plate, which consisted of: A bowl of pea soup, two large pancakes, a big slice of fresh-baked bread, a brick of scrambled eggs, a healthy slice of meat pie, slices of smoked meat, and some sausages, all doused in the richest of maple syrup. Frankly, I was surprised that I had finished my feast and managed to stand up and move around without collapsing or heaving it back up onto the table. 

My attention came into focus as the leader of the chaotic noise called out to us that it was time to dance. In a flash, the dance floor was flooded with people moving and singing to the beat of Ring of Fire, and I had no other option but to drop my spoons in a nearby basket and jump whole-heartedly into the melee. I barely had any space between my classmates and a nearby table by the time Cotton Eyed Joe echoed around the room, and that area only lessened as more people came onto the dance floor and started dancing the jig that goes with that particular song. 

As the final song ended and the hall cleared out, the smell of maple syrup caught everyone’s attention. We heard staff yell out to us as they poured some of the liquid gold onto a large tray of ice chips. Some of my friends and I wasted absolutely no time running to the soon-to-be maple taffy and grabbing some before anyone else could. However, our decision to prematurely shove popsicle sticks into the taffy and make an attempt at eating them proved to be unwise. The syrup dripped off the sticks and onto our hands before freezing, making it nearly impossible to get our hands to their previous pristine quality. This, of course, led to an extreme amount of whining, rubbing hands in the snow, and trying to scrape the sticky, maple goop off of our digits with anything and everything around us. 

Soon enough, the stars came out, the temperature dropped, and the teachers herdedus back to the bus. LIttle did they know, we still had plenty of energy left from the massive amounts of sugar we consumed during our dinner. So, without warning, the entire class started running down the hill and through the trees to the bus that would bring us back to the hotel. I took a moment to look around in the forest of maple trees, and I noticed that it was almost the same as it would be back in Vermont.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized: People around the world, especially those as close as Vermont and Québec, really aren’t nearly as different as we make them out to be. At the end of it all, we’re all just some people, stuck together on this planet we call Earth, and we have one common goal: to live. Not just to survive, but live, and make sure this world knows we were here, and that we mattered in one way or another.