At our house, the class of 2014 is Rachel.
Quite literally, a class of 1.
A class of her own?
The classiest one?
I guess, as a homeschooled student, you get to be all of the above.
Rachel can hold her own in a much larger class however. She has taken classes at the local high school for the past two years and has exercised her competitive side all the way to the top of every class she has taken there.
I honestly figured that Rachel would pursue studies in some creative field, or perhaps in writing (she did have an almost perfect SAT in that particular subject after all), but--after a lifetime of providing her with art supplies,crafting hobbies, and endless notebooks for her writing rather than toys to play with--she discovered a previously well-hidden interest in mathematics. She has been accepted into the Engineering program at the University of Maine in Orono to follow that interest. In fact, her academic ability has landed her a very nice merit scholarship from the University.
Rachel will spend the next two years in an integrated engineering program which UMO began a couple of years ago and has a limited enrollment of 25 students. We are particularly happy about that since that means we get to keep Rachel with us for a couple more years before she has to move away to complete her program. We aren't quite ready to part with her yet. She is only 17 after all, and is a lot of fun to have around with her quick wit and kindness to her siblings. And besides that, who would keep me up to date with what is hip and stylish?
While I can't say that Rachel is perfect, or even nearly perfect in every way-- she takes after her parents that way-- it has been an amazing experience to see how God's grace has been infused into her life. It makes me very thankful.
I'll leave you with this short mystery that Rachel wrote for her Creative Writing class last semester. I thought it was a unique twist on the assignment, and cleverly done. And also this little peek into her photography project this semester: https://sites.google.com/a/hs.
I press my face against the edge of the world and look out at what doesn't exist. Blurry shapes move back and forth just out of sight. The only thing that is always in sight is just outside the barrier and down, so I have to crane my neck to see. I look at it often, but all I can make out is a black number nine. I pull away and start back to town. As I pass the "Welcome to Maine" sign, it starts to snow. It's silly that we even have a sign- there are no visitors here.
Multicolored flakes settle on the water, held up by the surface tension till my fish drags them under. I sprinkle in more and wonder if he can see or recognize me. Maybe, through the glass, all he can see is blurry movements. Maybe his understanding is confined to the bowl that holds his world. I think of when the local loony ran around screaming that we lived in a globe. Everyone knows you can walk straight from barrier to barrier without so much as a rise in the ground. It never occurs to me to question my own world.
The next day, as with yesterday and the day before that, I'm sitting at the edge again, back pressed against the hard wall of the world. I zip up my coat as snow begins to fall. It has snowed every day of every year that I've been alive- of every day of every year that anyone's been alive. But today something is going to change. The world grows dark and then the sky cracks. The snow flies out of the barrier as if it had been imprisoned. Drops of blood the size of buckets rain down from the broken sky instead of the fluffy white flakes of earlier. The wall of the world falls away and I take my chance. As I run, I realize that for all of my existence, I haven't really known where I was.
That's our Rachel, and we love her! Oh, and we're a little bit proud of her too.
