They All Grow Up

Yesterday was a miserable rainy day. But we were on a mission! Husband and I took the money he'd been stashing in the bank for our granddaughter's education over the mountains to her. She needs to send a deposit to her college of choice Monday.

She was accepted at four great colleges -- MassArt, RISD, SCAD and Warren Wilson. The first three are schools of art, design and related studies. Warren Wilson is a small liberal arts college in North Carolina which has been reported as being one of the great bargains in college education.

Well, Granddaughter has visited all of them at one time or another. SCAD is hugely expensive, although it is very progressive. RISD fell by the wayside last weekend. And unfortunately, I was in the room with Granddaughter when she talked on the phone with someone at MassArt and decided that that wasn't going to work.

It looks like Warren Wilson. (Or maybe not...)

Not only did our daughter, her mom, go to Warrern Wilson, but so did our younger son, and Granddaughter's father's brother and his wife. And then there are close friends of the aforementioned relatives who are in and out of the house. And other people who know her and really want her to go to Warren Wilson.

I was thinking as we came back over the mountains in the driving rain that it's not so much the school you go to, but how much you dedicate yourself to learning what is there to be learned that determines a student's success in life. And I know that it is not always the brightest student who profits most from the work. There's more to college than the classes. There are life-long friendships to be built and sustained. There are new worlds to be explored.

Someday you may go into an environmentally conservative building and marvel at its design and usefulness, and Granddaughter will have been the architect.