Mountain Day!

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • October 18, 2021

Everyone should have a Mountain Day! Mine was September 30th this year.


What is Mountain Day you ask? Well, it is a LONG tradition at my alma mater – Mount Holyoke College (MHC) – and something we all looked forward to – and still do. We anticipate it – wondering if the beautiful, crisp fall day being forecasted will be the day.  Mt. Holyokers awake – or maybe do not – to the pealing on the College bells at 7AM alerting the campus to the fact that it is Mountain Day. This signifies a day free of classes and a chance to climb to the summit Mount Holyoke in a longstanding tradition at MHC. Bag lunches are provided and everyone in the Pioneer Valley knows its Mountain Day at MHC as students take over the PVTA – the bus service that serves the five colleges.


When I say longstanding – I mean VERY long. This is the college’s oldest tradition, dating back to our founder Mary Lyon and 1838. Besides women’s education she was also about making sure that women got outside and exercised so imagine what this looked like in 1838.


Even though I graduated many eons ago, we all continue to try and take part in Mountain Day no matter where we are. Mine was a lunch time drive out to Cisco where I birded briefly – binoculars on beach, water, and the pines. It also brought me emails and texts from fellow   alum – including my friend and sophomore roommate who is living in Rome. (We will allow for the fact that she transferred elsewhere our senior year – pulled by the college she attended on junior year exchange. But see the influence of Mountain Day?)


Many colleges have traditions but the women’s colleges, especially the Seven Sisters, have ones that have been around for so long and very much maintained in their original spirit or form. Take Founders Day at MHC (and Porter Deacon’s Hat – story for another day) and M&Cs. 


JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 19, 2025
May 27. {1857} There is this great difference between Niagara and other wonders of the world, that is you get no idea from descriptions or even from paintings. Of the Mammoth Cave you have a conception from what you are told, of the Natural Bridge you get really a truthful impression from a picture. But Cave and Bridge are in still life, Niagara is all activity and change. No picture gives you the varying form of the water of the change of color; no description conveys to your mind the ceaseless roar. So too the ocean must be unrepresentable to those who have not looked upon it. Maria Mitchell would tour the Mammoth Cave and the Natural Bridge during her trip to the southern United States as Prudence Swift’s chaperone – I have written of these travels and Prudence before. Niagara Falls is a place she likely saw on her way to visit her younger sister Phebe Mitchell Kendall, who once lived with her husband in Pennsylvania. I was a bit surprised that she feels the way she does about the Cave and Bridge being well-represented by images but I do kind of se her point. But Niagara, the ocean, any moving body of water – she is right. You don’t fully comprehend it until you hear it, touch and taste it, see its colors, and feel it splash, sprinkle, or mist across your face. Niagara certainly mists across your face – sort of like a breezy day at the beach and the salt mist that slowly builds across your face and coats the beach grass so that it shimmers in the sunlight. JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 12, 2025
I have been watching it. Waiting. Today, I was rewarded with the scent as they have now started to open. From late fall, all through the winter and early spring, there is a very large patch of dirt with traces of roots and purple-like portions of some sort of plant. Then, they slowly start to send their shoots forth – up from that dusty pile of dirt come little greenish pips that become the leaves. Then, you start to see the stems tightened against the leaves and then lovely chartreuse buds are visible that then turn to white and slowly open from top to bottom. As soon as they star to open, I wait. Knowing that one morning I will walk by soon and then I will get a delicious waft of Lily of the Valley. I have written about this patch at the Mitchell House before. I have always been fascinated by the fact that these grow in full sun – they have no shade whatsoever. And this patch is old. I’m not sure how old – I do not think late nineteenth century but possibly – or maybe very early twentieth century. We have one or two images in the collection from the early 1900s but one does not show the ground, and the other not so much either. I also think this is one of the earliest flowering patches of Lily of the Valley on island – let me know if you’ve seen others this early. And in FULL sun to boot! But in any case, today was the day – May 5, 2025 – that I got the first waft. Saturday when I was here, they were not ready yet. But now, they are! And when I smell it, I know why it was my mother-in-law’s favorite flower. JNLF

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