“If you are a morning person, up around 5:30 or 6 a.m. and strolling around campus, you have passed the lighted window of her office and seen her engrossed in her work,” wrote former English teacher Berrie Moos when English Department head Jane Archibald retired in 2014. 

Not much has changed in more than 10 years since Jane retired. She is up and out of the house on a morning walk routinely these days around 5:15. And she remains busy. Her hobbies involve music, birds — including a few Audubon hikes — old books, learning about family genealogy, writing, sending notes to her grandchildren, learning the names of more trees. Her first book, Walking Solo But Not Alone, was published this year. 

There are 15 essays in the book, published by Newman Springs Publishing Inc. The description notes that the essays are distinct yet also work sequentially, “presenting earth and nature as our one home and all homo sapiens as our worldwide family.” 

Jane was an English teacher at Loomis Chaffee from 1973 to 1976 and 1987 to 2014. She was English Department head from 1989 to 2000 and from 2013 to 2014. She taught every grade level, dozens of electives, and started the Writing Workshop program. 

Music has always been part of her life — from playing oboe and guitar to singing — and each summer she attends a music camp in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec with her sister. They bring their own food, and they pitch a tent, an echo of childhood, she says. The music is wonderful, she says, as are the teachers, the woods, and the congeniality with others. 

On this early December morning, as we sit in her historic Windsor home, which is more than 200 years old, she reflects on writing the book. Her husband, Robert, died in August 2018.  They were married for more than 50 years. At one point she said to herself, “Jane, you have to get a project.” 

She eventually sat down at the table and says she “just started writing. I didn’t have a book in mind. I simply wrote reflections. When I got to about six or eight of them and looked them over, I thought, ‘These kind of connect.’” She kept writing, and she had a book, a process that took a few years.

What she found most enjoyable and assuring, she says, was the regularity of sitting down and writing. The English teacher certainly was coming out in her. “I love working with sentences and words and ideas, and so once I started, it sort of flowed, one piece to the next,” she says. “In some ways, it is like music: You wend your way.” 

You might also say she knitted together the essays; she is a lifelong knitter of sweaters, 70 to 80, she says.  

Jane describes the book on the back cover as presenting “the warmth of our humanity in the 2024 context of a somewhat unsettled earth.” 

As she sits in a chair in her study, she talks about what she was feeling around the time of the pandemic. “I felt our cultural tones and voices — you listen to the news and this and that — and I didn't really like the tone. I felt it was not worthy of us. ... I really focused on humanity, and that is where the book started. We have to be humane, we have to be human beings. I didn’t want to belabor it, but I wanted it there as a sentiment always.” 

Present in the book, too, is our responsibility to protect the environment. Jane grew up around nature, walking, hiking, climbing mountains such as Mount Katahdin in Maine, and sleeping under the stars. Her mother was a camp counselor; her paternal grandmother was born and raised in the north woods of Maine. 

“I just worry about what we are doing and aren’t doing. ... We don’t pay enough attention or see it as a living earth,” she says. “It needs our care. I wanted to say in the final chapters that we all have to be caretakers.”    

As she writes at the end of the book, “Climate change will not be moderated by science exclusively, rather by committed human beings working together. Our humanity — a generous legacy of possibility from our forebears near and distant — has the extraordinary power to extend our common future on earth for generations. As always, with some luck and the wind at our backs.”   

When she was writing her book, she generally started with her early morning walks — pen and paper with her if she needed to jot down an idea. 

When she was a teacher, she often graded papers in her office early in the morning. She always felt compelled to get them back to the students within 24 hours. “I thought they learned more that way,” she says. 

She says she loved the classroom, calling it unpredictable. She enjoyed teaching all ages. She remembers advanced courses for seniors in which they’d sit around a table. “I could set the tone, and they would move with that,” Jane says. “And they became very comfortable saying whatever they wanted to say and asking whatever question they wanted to ask. That was very joyful, and I feel I spoke to that as I was writing.” 

As the interview winds down and we move to the living room, a few boxes of books that Jane recently took out of storage sit on the floor. Jane says she has “hundreds and hundreds” of books in the house. 

She has about 20 books from the 1700s, she says, reaching into a box for one that has been in her family for years. It is from 1704. The books sit next to her piano. She is self-taught on the piano. Earlier she had told a story of her grandson Sam sitting and playing for hours, of her granddaughter Nora’s ability with the violin. Music runs deep in the family — her father was quite accomplished on the violin and piano — and she says she can sense the grandkids have that same bent. Her voice conveys how special that is to her. She visits them in Pittsburgh every chance she gets. The book is dedicated to “Nora, Sam, and all lifelong learners.” 

We just had to ask the former teacher to give herself a grade on the book. She talks for a bit, then says, “I know that isn’t really answering the question.” She talks some more about the book, then says, “Let me get back to grading myself. ... I think I’d probably say an A, but could easily put a little minus next to that.” 

Room to improve on a second book, if there is to be one. She is not sure, but she does have some notes jotted down. Those early morning walks just might bring clarity. 

Jane was the guest author at the Chaffee Book Club dinner and discussion on Wednesday, December 3, in the Head’s House. She also will be doing a book chat in person with a virtual component on Wednesday, January 21, in Gilchrist Auditorium.