Stop and smell the autumn
The evening I first stepped down from the Dinky was the coldest March day of my senior year of high school. I did not believe in love at first sight before that footstep, but soon I was meeting students so extraordinary and standing by castles so magnificent that I didn’t notice my own shivering. By the time I boarded a bus to New York that next afternoon, Princeton was my favorite place in the world. “If I can go here,” I thought, “I’ll be so happy.” We fantasizers all remember our ecstasy when we learned this wonderland had been promised to us. For me, that surge of disbelieving joy came two days after my visit, when decision letters went live online. Five months later, when my Outdoor Action bus rounded the corner onto Nassau Street, I felt ten solid minutes of rapture.