Post-Reunion Reflections From a Weekend in Walla Walla

Originally published in Culture Study, Oct. 4, 2024. Reprinted with permission.

I’m feeling top-heavy with nostalgia this week, at once emotionally wrung out and gratified. I spent Thursday through Sunday of last week at my 20th college reunion in Walla Walla, Washington, along with dozens of my very close friends and hundreds of my classmates. A group of 16 of us stayed in one house—no kids, no partners who hadn’t also attended Whitman—and the entire experience had an undercurrent of languid ease and joy.

How wonderful, how priceless, to be surrounded by the people who were so responsible for shaping the adult you became—and the person you’re still becoming? I know not everyone has this experience with college; I also know very few colleges can offer this sort of reunion scenario, which hinges on small classes (as in: 300 in my graduating class) of students tightly bonded through sports, small dorms, interest groups, majors, and, at least in our case, a small but socially important Greek System.

But our small college also does something different than most small colleges I know:

The reunion happens in late September, and it’s almost always a “cluster” (meaning: you’re grouped with two other classes above and/or below you). Late September means most alumni are far less busy with summer weddings, activities, or their kids’ summer stuff. It’s also a particularly perfect time to be in Walla Walla, with the wheat fields golden in late summer light and harvest dust that creates ridiculous nightly sunsets. The feeling of September imprints strongly on students while they’re there; asking them back is like asking them back to their favorite college memory.

Doing the reunion in September means alumni can’t stay in the dorms (standard at many summer college reunions). Instead, people end up in the dozens of Airbnbs walkable to campus (a symptom of the thriving local wine industry and subsequent tourism). There are hotels, too, but there’s something particularly wonderful about staying in a big house and coming down at breakfast and aimlessly shooting the shit about everything that happened the night before. It’s a lot more like, well, college.

And then there’s the cluster. The college is small enough that everyone becomes close with people outside of their year. A reunion of just my class would be fine; this is way more fun. It also accounts for the fact that many people from Whitman marry other people from Whitman (within my close friend group alone, there are four Whitman couples). That phenomenon is not unique to my college (a lot of fascinating class/education status reproduction going on) but the cluster format can transform my reunion into our reunion.

That’s the general—and, to my mind, most important—structure that makes these reunions work. The alumni office also puts a ton of planning into additional programming (class visits, talks, oral history opportunities, tours) but the main events are big, casual, outdoors parties on Friday and Saturday. (This year’s Friday party was particularly good, in part because it took place at a new public space downtown with ample food trucks and vendors pouring local wine and beer—far superior to eating food-service-catered canapes in the ballroom at the student union).

But the best stuff, let’s be real—none of it is arranged by the college. It’s retracing your favorite running route, or recreating the frisbee golf campus course, or clearing the living room of your Airbnb to have a pong tournament. It’s wallowing in the place-ness, that deep well of memory and self.

I was telling a friend (not from my college) about the reunion, the house, the way I lost my voice from talking nonstop over the course of what amounted to a three day adult sleepover, and they said they couldn’t imagine how draining it would be to spend all that time with other people. For me, that’s usually the case; I’m a very classic introvert who can turn on the extrovert energy when needed.

But with these friends, there’s a foundational and enduring intimacy that creates ease. I have shared a bathroom with many of these women—in one form or another, during and after school—for anywhere between one and seven years. We’ve studied together and cried together and been naked together and pulled pranks together and figured shit out together, and sometimes we did all of that with our guy friends, too. No one gives me shit quite like these friends, and there’s no one I like giving shit to more.

Which doesn’t mean there’s not occasional weirdness or enduring wounds. But the emotional intensity of reunion week also creates space for small catharses: what’s a twenty year reunion for if not running into like three of your exes and giving them a long, loving hug? Last reunion, I finally cleared the air with my senior year dude nemesis (now we’re even friends!).

Still, there’s an emotional cost. I have always been a nostalgic person, but maybe it’s more precise to say I’ve been a commemorative person: I knew I couldn’t fully process this experience until I wrote about it. Part of the ritual of my friendships is talking about all that we did and felt and why we did it and felt it. I’ve found that understanding changes, in big and small ways, each time we tell the story. It’s a form of processing, of course, as much as it’s a form of nostalgia. But I felt so much this weekend: so many memories resurfaced and flew through me. I am so grateful and I am so incredibly tender.