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The first time I hear this term, it is a gorgeous day—New England is beginning to hint at its famed fall colours, and the day warms gently from crisp morning to buttery soft afternoon sunshine—and everyone seems vaguely unhappy. I learn why in my after-lunch class, a timeslot I despise even more than the ever-feared 8:30 start time, because my eyelids inevitably start to droop and caffeine always manages to desert me in my time of need.

One of my classmates throws her bag onto the table across from me with a resounding whump before dramatically flinging herself into her seat and throwing her head onto the table as well (for good measure.) “I wanted it to be Mountain Dayyyy,” she says, desk-muffled.

“I heard it was supposed to be today, but the bells were broken so they couldn’t call it,” says the girl she walked in with (who sets herself down somewhat more delicately than her friend.)

The girl sitting next to me, who has been very quiet up until this point, now joins in. “No, KMac”—that would be President Kathleen McCartney—“isn’t at school right now—she’s at a conference or something. That’s why.” This is said authoritatively enough to be quickly accepted as truth.

The dramatic one, head momentarily up off the table again, huffs at this. “They better call it soon.”

Another girl spies her chance to contribute; she chimes in, with a sadistic gleam in her eye. “My crew instructor told us that they used to never call it before the very end of October, and that President McCartney wants to start transitioning back to that!”

Uproar.

Mountain Day is a long-standing Smith College tradition. It is up to the President of the College to denote the “first real day of Fall” by ringing the bells in the quad at 7am, signalling a spontaneous day off for all students. Classes before 7 pm are cancelled, and students are expected to participate in fall-type events. There are buses running to a local apple orchard every 30 minutes; there are nature hikes, morning yoga on the hill with President McCartney. Some houses (residences) schedule their own events, like going to pumpkin patches. Smaller houses have baking parties.

Students at Smith are very vocal about their needs. The President lives on campus, and her house is often the site of demonstrations; this, amongst many other things, was what led to the College’s monumental policy change this year which allows anyone identifying as a woman, be they trans- or cisgender, to be accepted at Smith, a women’s-only college since its founding in 1871.

This year, they also gathered outside the President’s house to demand Mountain Day.

This is just one of the many things that manages to surprise me into remembering that I am not, dear Toto, in Kansas anymore. There are logistical things—inches, feet and miles, exchange rates, and I’ve come to accept the fact that Fahrenheit is just never going to mean anything to me without a conversion—but by and large, it’s easy to forget that I’m in a different country, in a world where my experiences don’t necessarily correlate to those of the people around me.

There are jokes I miss, about things like mistaking the words of the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school. I only remember I’m near New York on September 11, when the cafeteria workers are exchanging stories about where they were, what they were doing, who they were with 14 years ago. Imagine me, watching election results online too late at night on my computer with headphones in. I’m happy. I text my parents in exclamatory, caps-locked celebration. But in classes the next day I hear nothing about it, because it doesn’t register as being in any way important to the people around me. I do end up talking to a few very conscientious students about the election—the kind that dutifully read New York Times articles online every morning—and they listen to my ramblings with polite and kind-hearted disinterest.

In my personal experience, other students here either seem to hold no awareness or interest in Canada beyond a hazy impression of cold socialists, or they have an excited, strangely idealistic notion of us—Canada is a realm in which the bad things don’t happen, why can’t we be more like them? I have a lot of trouble with that last one, stuck between a feeling of overwhelming pride and an urge to walk around with Canadian newspapers, saying, “read this! And this one! Just look at all of our bad things!”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.” That’s the Proust quote that I crafted my Killam application’s personal statement around—not so original, I know, but I think it nicely sums up something that anyone who travels can attest to. What is more comforting than the realization that, no matter how much we love where we have come to, we are ready to go home, home to the place we were so eager to escape when we left? Or maybe we never feel this way; maybe we end up seeing our home-worlds with a clarity that is more unsettling.

Being here, I ask myself to be Canadian in a way that I do not feel is necessary at home, amongst other Canadians, and I ask myself to listen, pay attention. By doing this I learn. And I made an argument in that personal statement that I will reiterate here: I think literature teaches us how to do this—to dive into another world, into someone else’s head, to feel empathy and to learn about ourselves through analogy and contrast.

Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s Mountain Day, and there are fall leaves and apple pie.

Erin Sheilds is a former Department of English Language and Literature Studies student. Erin is currently at Smith College on a Killam fellowship.