Yesterday afternoon, I spent a couple hours in the blazing sun, mulching the Sustainable Food Initiative garden with old Weather Vane issues. I crouched on the ground, surrounded by a million copies of the image from the BSU town hall meeting that we ran several weeks ago. Irene Kniss’s face blurred with pounds of steaming earth. The sun beat down onto me as I moved through a semester’s worth of papers, watching them smother the grass, trying to beat out the new baby plants springing up around me.

Because there’s not a lot else to do after you’ve read through the same newspaper issue three hundred times, I started to think about this editorial. See, it’s my last one, and it feels like it needs to be exceptionally good—a treatise on the nature of higher education and our place in it, or something equally lofty. Instead, the only thing I could think about was how distinctly hopeful and happy everything felt.

I was surrounded by new life and dirt and a visual representation of a semester in which I spent more time than I thought possible agonizing over eight pages of print.

I don’t mean this to become an awkwardly overbearing Easter sermon, and yet I’m afraid it’s starting to sound a bit like that. Spring brings out an unfortunate tendency in me: I become endlessly hopeful and annoyingly cheerful.

As I kept mulching and whistling and generally feeling smugly satisfied that this newspaper was getting another life as a weed killer, I realized that I had gotten to newspapers that were published before my editorship. I stopped and appreciated the work that so many editors and writers did before I even wandered onto the Weather Vane scene.

An issue displaying the grim words announcing budget cuts accompanied by a particularly mournful picture of Collin Longenecker floated before my eyes. I stopped, read the article, and remembered, before dolloping a hefty scoop of soil and a flake of straw onto the issue.

Then I thought about the recent restructuring conversation held in Common Grounds. Many students expressed excitement, fear, frustration, and a deeply-held desire to be heard by the institution in which they have found themselves for these few years.

And so I began wondering: do we as students have any kind of say over what happens in an institution where we live and work for only four (at most, five) years? How do we hold our legitimate concerns about a school that we love, with the understanding that we are part of a much larger system—one that we might never get the chance to completely understand? How do we best make use of our energy, skills, and passion? How do we hold a school accountable while maintaining some sense of humor and realizing that we don’t know everything?

I answered none of these questions. Instead, I tried to craft a metaphor out of my pile of rain-stained newspapers and compost.

My conclusions are these: we need to hold our presences lightly in this place, recognizing that the longevity of our connection, at least in the role as students, is about as lasting as a newspaper left outside during a summer rain.

However, we still have the potential to create real change. The metaphoric newspapers-turned-to-mulch of our time at EMU becomes an amendment to a deep, deep soil that transcends each of our own experiences. The ideas and work that we share in our fleeting time here may just have a deeper impact than we think possible.

And with that, I sign off of my final Weather Vane editorial. I am so grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to grapple with big ideas and listen to the deeply important stories that guide all of our lives.