FOUR MONTHS HAVE PASSED | Masa Israel

by Sophie Stepakoff, Eco Israel 

 

12/22/17. A little over a month to go living this incredibly ecological lifestyle on my farm. In one of the bathroom stalls -which are compost toilets for a refresher- on the door, there are many pictures and stickers, cut outs from magazines and artwork. Among them I found a quote written by a farm member in 2014. It goes, “You get this feeling when you leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people, but you’ll miss the person that you are at that time and that place, because you’ll never be that way ever again.” When I read the quote for the first time it took a while to sink in and is still sinking in. It’s true. 

I am not the same person as I was when I was studying in school, when I was rowing, when I was working at Camp Barney over the summer (a Jewish sleep-away camp in north Georgia), when I was coming home to my parents each night. I miss these parts of me, these stages. Of course they live within me and have made me who I am today. It’s easy to glorify the past or at least look back on it with nostalgia I think. (My AP Lit teacher told me not to start sentences with “It,” sorry Mr Fleenor