At Miss Porter's, Graduates Leave as Ancients

Ancient, at eighteen. I am forty-eight and my children already use the word about me, without a ceremony.

The school's program for its June 3, 2022, graduation explains the traditions, step by step.

First, the daisy wreath. Right after diplomas, a wreath of daisies is hung to honor all Ancients, past and present. The seniors with the most Ancients in their families gather, and the one with the longest and most direct line of legacies hangs it.

Then the daisy chain. Nobody has a written record of when it began; the school believes the late nineteenth century. Students used to pick the daisies in local fields. Now, according to the program, a local florist uses more than 8,000 of them. The seniors carry the chain from the Swan Pond up to the fountain garden, singing a song a senior wrote in 1909, escorted by the Perilhettes, a singing group, who carry crooks to help everyone keep the rhythm.

Crooks. Like shepherds. For rhythm. I have been to a lot of graduations and none of them had enough crooks.

On the way, the chain stops at the Main portico, where a copper beech, once the largest tree on campus, used to stand. The student head of school and the head of the Perilhettes are given a silver trowel and a pot of ivy, and plant the ivy at the base. Then the trowel goes back to its cabinet, the program says, "to be safely locked away until the next graduation."

The silver trowel works one day a year and then is locked in a cabinet until the next graduation. I would take that job.

Last, at the fountain, students and every Ancient present sing two songs that have been sung there since 1908. That ends it.

The Ancients keep meeting. The school runs a Worldwide Sit-Down Dinner, and in 2023 two alumnae who graduated seven years apart met at the one in Miami, discovered they were both lawyers whose practices overlapped, and became friends instead of opponents.

At our house the eldest, a junior, has started calling the youngest the New Girl. The youngest has accepted this. The middle one is an Old Girl and objects strongly. I asked what that makes me. All three agreed. Ancient.