RE LOG Spring '25

SPRING 2025 Ransom Everglades LOG 47 shock that we looked the same as we did in 1970, we each took a few minutes to share where we were in the journey of life. By December, our wonderful host, Maggie Pearson ’80 , Assistant Director of Alumni Engagement, sent us the Zoom video clip to watch. And this prompted more emailed updates from those who missed the initial call: Laura Seff, Darryl Larson, Sonia Lorie Alexander, Mary Lindsley Taylor, Donna Sprague Chase and Nancy Pelly. “In reminiscing recently with classmate Deborah Wright about that event, we realized that the #1 song in America in the early 1970s was Carole King’s ‘Tapestry.’ Deborah and I shared together the metaphor of that song as the story of our many vibrant lives over these 55 years. ‘My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue …’ “We began to imagine each of our lives, over these 55 years as a richly hued woven tapestry. We had shared our stories in our Zoom gathering and email as if we were a circle of Wise Women, passing the proverbial Talking Stick. What did our tapestries look like? Had they turned out as we expected? Where had there been surprises? Where were the snags in the threads, the places where the images somehow went awry? Where had our woven years given birth to things we might never have imagined? “What a glorious and poignant tapestry we had created together in our shared stories. From our beginning, the ESFG Class of 1970 was the first in a few things. We were the first class to tiptoe into coeducation – a precursor of what would become RE. Bobbi Isberg and Deborah were our original STEM girls, traveling to the Ransom campus to take their physics and calculus classes. Our senior year gave birth to a fabulous experiment led by Arva Moore Parks (McCabe) – an intern/ apprentice program in our final semester where we each found placements in the fields we thought we wanted to pursue in college. Fifty years later it was amazing and amusing to discover that many of us had stayed on that path while others had taken drastic turns along the way. “When asked what it was about ESFG that had made the difference, we agreed that by nature perhaps of our being in a girls’ school, we had been intrinsically taught that as women, we could do and be whatever we imagined – that there was not a table at which we did not deserve a seat. So here we were – doctors and lawyers, caterers and clergy, graphic designers and financiers, artists and artisans, academicians and musicians, a world-renowned photographer of Arabian horses, for heaven’s sake! We are world pilgrims and keepers of the home hearth. We are mothers, grandmothers, widows and single women. There are snags in our tapestry – broken hearts and marriages, lost hopes, lost children, lost health. We lost a few altogether along the way, dying way too young, and we lost track of a few – but triumphantly found several others after years of searching! “Now in our 70s, we stand back from the grandeur that is our one tapestry pieced together by our separate lives and mostly we know gratitude for the journey – begun in our budding youth, with our first periods, all the way past menopause! What a grand piece of art we are! “Most importantly, in the end, we agreed we wanted some way to honor our faithful fellow classmate and Class Ambassador Cree McDougal Scudder, whose unwavering enthusiasm has helped keep us in touch all these years. More than three quarters of our class contributed to purchase one of Cree’s beautiful paintings, which will hang in the Braman Media Center on the Everglades Campus – our original home. Then Cree and her husband, Ned, donated the painting, which will allow our funds to go straight to RE’s annual fund, The Fund for RE. It is a gift that celebrates who we are and who we became, because of our time together at ESFG.” (Our lives have) been a tapestry of rich, embroidered hue an everlasting vision of the ever-changing view a wonderous, woven magic in bits of blue and gold a tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold. by Carole King Everglades Class of 1970 55th Zoom reunion Cree McDougal Scudder