Chicora College for Women - Nods and Becks Yearbook (Columbia, SC)

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Christmas came with cold, clear nights that made us look up at the haze-circled moon and wonder at its being and at our own. This time of year, perhaps, we felt the closest to each other. The Yule Log Ceremony first ushered in our Christmas spirit, a binding sort of spirit. We saw and heard and felt the same: familiar faces lighted by the popping bonfire and by small candles that quietly and unnoticed dripped red wax on gloved hands; hot wassail that seared the tips of our tongues; rounded mouths that caroled winter smoke which blended with the windy swirls of smoke from the Yule log; a high child-voice that spoke, “Oh, fire, burn away all evil!” A Peanut's circe in a knee- sock stocking . . . the clean, pine smell of the ornamented tree in Burwell . . . Christmas chimes peeling from the bright church steeple on Selwyn. We especially noticed the small things then, and we noticed each other. Page Eight

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Johnson! Goldvvatcr! We thrust ourselves into the rally spirit and the characteristically controversial campaign. We talked about it in our rooms and wrote about it in our letters; yes, we argued, too. Mock election ... a “whistle- stop’’ tour ... a can of Gold Water, an LBJ hat ... a remark subtly slipped into a class lecture ... a bumper sticker high on a mirror. By the first of November it was all over. We sighed, from relief or from disappointment or from resignation, and went about our business. But not long afterward our aliveness was reinforced. Sunday, November 22, 1964: after one year’s loss. 1 he assassination of Kennedy—had it really happened? How evasive and long-past it all was, yet how clearly we still heard the martial music and the clicking rifles and the military footsteps. That Sunday was a reflective day. We saw beyond ourselves and Queens College, and we saw a death-livened present—for a while, at least. Page Seven d

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W inter mornings soon ceased. We opened windows, no longer ice-glazed, to the friendly rumble of lawn mowers and the delicious smell of new-cut spring grass. We let in the sunny shrieks and belly-laughs of school children on the neighboring playground. (How we would have loved to romp barefooted with them!) 7e saw full-bloomed one dav the thousand shades of pink azaleas around Blair Union, and then we looked up at solid blue sky, pieced only by freshly-greened oak limbs. These were happy days of long walks and bicycle rides, of four-leaf clover hunts, of guitars and sandals and cocoa butter. The year was ending— quickly, now. Page Nine M 4