Storythreads

Dear Friends,

Near the end of Spring semester, I met with a group of ninth graders who had just finished their work on the Fig Tree Project, an annual collaboration between D’vorah Horn’s Mending Spirit organization and AFS. Students this year were brought to the Hillcrest Center in search of wisdom from elders in that community, interviewing the residents about their lives and then documenting these conversations in memoir.

The students with whom I spoke came away from these interviews with incredible energy, bursting with insight drawn from the weight of their partners’ stories. They told me, with excitement and trepidation, that these elders lived such full lives that they felt a duty to recount them faithfully. In the memoirs themselves, you can see how the ninth grade writers hang onto every word spoken by their elder as the latter traced the thread of their lives back to their beginnings—a pastor’s daughter who worked in a cafeteria and gave extra helpings of food to children; a man who did not know his parents, was raised by his neighborhood, and spoke reverently about following your dreams; an extroverted woman with Alzheimer’s who took pictures of her interviewers so that she could remember them week-to-week

As these students understand, there is a certain indescribable joy in telling people’s stories, wonder mixed with responsibility. It is a privilege to record the winding path of someone’s life on the narrow space of the page. 

In this issue of Oak Leaves, I spoke with a number of our alums from the last 45 years to capture snapshots of their journeys after they ventured forth from AFS. As an alumnus of AFS, I know very well that students sometimes cannot see the world after graduation, or only understand it abstractly. Much like the 9th graders’ Fig Tree Project, my hope was to capture some of the wisdom that these alumni have gleaned on their journeys, to curate the immense range of possibilities that exist just over the horizon, and to make visible the thread that ties each and every one of our alumni back to the Grove of the Meeting House, and to Commencement, and to their years of learning at Abington Friends School. 

I have found that in the years following graduation, the thread that ties an alum’s story back to AFS becomes more visible, and pulls more strongly. If you do notice that thread is pulling you back, I invite you to follow it all the way back to Jenkintown, where you too can share your story with us.

Sincerely,
Matt MacNaughton
Editor of Oak Leaves
Class of 2011