Trash goes in the bin, and it’s never seen again. Dirty Frye street bathrooms become pristine every week. Paying rent, cooking, cleaning, garbage day. For most of my life, these facts sounded both so close yet so far from me. I knew they had to be done, but they remained far outside of my responsibilities. Out of sight, out of mind.
Along with other Bates students, I have had the privilege of avoiding domestic maintenance for most of my life. Switching in and out of dorms and Frye street houses, “home” has been a space that has tended to me more than I’ve tended to it. Sure, with posters and decorations I’ve made them my room, but they were all carefully tacked on then taken off, making sure no damage was done for the newcomers. I was just a passer-by.
Being an ocean away from my real home, I have been trying, and failing, to find a place of comfortable belonging on campus. I found it hard to spark any real personal connection in the bigger dorms. The only space shared with your peers are the hallways that are either a homogenous gray or brightly fluorescent. Every door is sealed close by their unknown owner who you’ve run into maybe only a handful of times in the halls. The walls are painted fresh at the beginning of each year, as if no one ever lived there– unmarked and uninviting.
Living off-campus, I still keep all my decor on command tacks, but it feels more like a home. Not because I went from sharing a bathroom with a whole floor to with just two others, or that I have a nice shiny pair of keys dangling by my pocket, or the “free” laundry, but because our home needs to be taken care of day after day. We make our home through the mundane routines. Every pot of coffee, every meal I cook, every Sunday when we move the trash bins out, we leave traces of labor around the house– traces remembered and learnt from.
Taking care of an apartment sounds like a lot of work, and when I first moved in, I was paralyzed with the responsibilities that I’d taken on. There was certainly a disparity between my property-owning dream and the realities of a tenant. I had no idea that bleach needs to be diluted with water first, or how to dry cutting boards so they don’t mold. But when doing things around the house settled into a routine, I began to find solace in claiming a space as my own.
Cleaning is cathartic, but even more so when you realize it’s a form of self-care. In routine, I found the freeing power of work, the rhythm of domestic life and my growing love for a space well tended to. Hours laboring away at the kitchen has pushed me into a more personalized connection with the house, just by the sheer amount of time spent together. You grow to know how far grease splashes around the stovetop, what crevices are particularly talented at harboring cooking scraps and which nooks and crannies to look for when something goes missing.
The walls might have always been listening, but now I can speak their language.
Of course, fostering a domestic life better observed and practiced isn’t an exclusive perk to living off-campus, simply a hard-learned lesson that came with it. For those of us on campus, the making of your homes shouldn’t end after move-in day. It could start with something as small as paying attention and showing gratitude for those who make our home for us: Saying hi to your custodians, screaming “thank you” into the common dishes carousel and stopping the bogarting of the communal vacuum. Just because the process has not been seen does not mean it wasn’t done. If it wasn’t your back aching over the toilet rim, or your hands cracking from soap water, then it’s up to you to appreciate our caretakers!
