“If you had to describe last year in one word, what would it be?” I asked my friends, feeling the nostalgic and reflective magnetism of New Year’s. It was January 10, 2025, and my friends and I had just started a tradition of making and eating Friday morning breakfast together for a few weeks during the winter 2025 quarter. Krissy and Keilani started it when they made fluffy pancakes, eggs, and sausages. This week was Alyssa’s french toast with Alley’s lemon curd, Alley’s frittatas, sausages that Keilani and Krissy made, rice from Nobu’s chicken adobe the night before, and hojicha lattes that I made. In the following weeks, it would be Alyssa’s heirloom tomato sandwiches, and Japanese breakfast with miso soup, sweet potatoes, tempura, tamago, and salmon from me and Nobu. I asked the question, knowing my one word, finding my answer in the food and people around the table: ripe.
My freshman year of college, four years ago, I broke the soil. College was a garden full of fruit trees, and I was given my own little plot of land. It was barren, dry, and unfamiliar, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I was overwhelmed, terrified and depressed, crying constantly because I didn’t believe in myself. It would take time and pain for the calluses on my hands to thicken, for experience to tell me which seeds to plant, when, where, and how; in the meantime, I was invited by faculty, friends, and the odd person passing by to try different fruits.
I spent that year relishing in all these new fruits, the acrid tang of chemistry, the striated skin of creative writing, the tart of late nights with new friends, the funky contours of hard lessons learnt, and planted seeds from all these new classes, relationships, and memories. Some seeds blew from places out of my control, and some seeds burrowed deep into me sometimes without my knowledge, sometimes without my choice, but by the end of the year, I had broken the soil and begun to root. So had my friends, each garden starting to take on a personality of its own.
When Krissy, Alley, and I (KAK! which is our apartment name as we all live in an apartment together now) talk about sophomore year, we talk about it as a blank. Suddenly, the intense emotional battle of breaking ground disappeared, and growth seemed stagnant. We stared at our young little plants and questioned what they would look like full-grown, if they were worth our time and efforts now. There was a lot of uprooting that year and replanting that year, and our gardens began to look more and more unique. I had decided to switch from pre-medicine to pre-dentistry. So did Nobu, and he added a plethora of art trees to his garden. Krissy switched from pre-medicine to pre-PA, Alley to pre-medicine, Iman to art, so forth and so on.
By junior year, our roots had grown deep enough that we felt more comfortable venturing further, spending more time in each other’s gardens, sharing the flowers blooming before our fruits. Our roots became deeper and deeper, but maybe more importantly, broader and broader. I come from Northern California, where there are vast forests of towering redwoods. In classes growing up, we learned that Redwoods are able to grow taller than any other living organism because their roots intertwine with the roots of other redwoods in the forest, enabling them to withstand the strongest of winds. In South Hall, we made new friends with the cohorts above and below us. We intertwined our roots every time we passed the T.V. room and got sucked into the random karaokes, karate lessons, nail paintings, makeovers, Outer Banks marathons, fencing, deep discussions about religion, and Minecraft, amongst other things. We intertwined our roots every time we got Five Star Pho, Canes, Tacos Y Mas, and OMOMO.
We learned what it meant to have a community. Elva and I talked about it once, coming out of Dr. Mallery and Dr. Ferrera’s Honors class, Changing Communities. Suddenly, we were spending less money because we didn’t need material goods to give us joy, to make us feel content; we had each other. We were crying less, feeling less burnt out, less tired, and more alive, more inspired, more ambitious, and productive. We found meaning in sharing our lives, our experiences and our joys and our sorrows.
Now I’m at the end of my senior year, and the fruits from the seeds of freshman year are ripe.
I hold a basket full of fruits in the unique and diverse shapes, textures, and flavors of my friends’ labors of love. How did I get so lucky?
I don’t cry as much as I used to, but I sobbed uncontrollably last week watching Nobu design his art website, so proud of who he’s become, so humbled that I got to experience his growth by his side. I cried last week watching Iman perform her lead role in the opera Romeo and Juliet, remembering how she used to stop herself from singing in front of us freshman year because she was scared of judgment. I sobbed last week while recording Krissy singing Homage, a song we worked on together. I thought about how she played her song Not Alone for me during our freshman year, and how I cried with pride when she performed it at La Sierra’s open mic. I was overcome by nostalgia, feeling like the present was a memory I missed so deeply, even though it was right in front of me.
That’s the thing about ripe fruit: you get to enjoy and take pride in the sweetness of its flesh, revel in the act of sharing it with others, but you also know the season’s almost over.
In 2021, during my first quarter at La Sierra, I wrote a freshman corner Honorgram article. I finished it by saying, “I have found lovely people that make life new and beautiful who I want to continue making memories with at La Sierra. It makes me excited to be able to look back and see all the growth and memories I have made, and it’s all I could ever ask for.” In 2025, I can say without a doubt that I couldn’t have ever imagined just how much growth and just how many cherished memories I would make. I’ll take the seeds of all our ripe fruits of this season into the next, and stand taller with the roots of us.
—Katie Jang, English Literature/Pre-dentistry: Class of 2025