It has started. Back-to-school commercials are slowly populating time slots between television shows, and probably being ignored by kids across the country. For me, it is a friendly reminder I am not going back to school this September for the first time since I started kindergarten.

I’m not complaining. I don’t think I’ll miss the cost of college books, the sinking feeling as professors hand out syllabi that seem impossible to complete or the endless hours of reading and research schoolwork entails. However, I know I’ll miss the back-to-school shopping.

Along with a new school year always came new supplies. It was like Christmas a couple months early, because even if I had notebooks, pens and pencils left over from the year before, I still needed more. 

The search for pens was always crucial. I liked the more expensive ones of course, not your simple blue Bic pens. Pencils needed the same attention, because mechanical ones were always cooler than standard No. 2 lead pencils that you had to get up in front of the class to sharpen. 

A notebook for each subject became necessary as I progressed each year. Teachers required us to pass journals in, and if you had more than one subject in one notebook, how could you study if the teacher had it? Then through high school and college I had the ongoing debate between notebooks and binders with loose-leaf pages: Which was better? Which was more practical?

I never answered that question, and even now it pains me to have page after page of notes in my reporter’s notebook, jumping back and forth from one story to the other. 

OK, I’ll admit I am anal retentive when it comes to notebooks and writing utensils, but I think I’m also convinced the better the material you can use, the better quality work you produce.

When I was little, I tried desperately to convince my mother every August I needed a new backpack. I managed to have some various styles throughout grade school, including a black and then an orange version of the classic L.L. Bean, and when high school rolled around, it was all about the messenger bag, of which I had at least one each year of high school. In college it went from my handmade totes, to a smaller, trendy backpack, to just carrying what I needed from my car (portable locker) to class. This obsession with bags is never ending as currently in my apartment entryway there are probably four bags laying around waiting to be used.

Aside from the supplies, days were slated to go clothes shopping with mom. We would collect coupons from Macy’s, Old Navy, JC Penny, Lane Bryant, Famous Footwear and Kohls, then head off early in the morning not to return home until after dinner. A fashion show always ensued for my dad – who was riveted, I’m sure. 

But this August, when mom and I go shopping, it will be without real purpose. I may buy clothes, but it will be for outfits appropriate for work and reasonable for fall and winter. The office is stocked with reporter’s notebooks and pens, so I plan to resist an innate urge to take a trip to Staples. 

The day I graduated from college, I talked to my cousin and I told him it didn’t feel like college was over, that reality hadn’t hit me. He told me I’d only realize it when September rolls around.

— Emma Bouthillette