For those of you who didn’t know, there are officially people living in the blue and brown houses that the university has been building for the last few months on Rowland Ave. The House of Linguistic Diversity, A.K.A HOLD, which I am a member of, have moved into the blue sluplex. In a lot of ways it really is a privilege to get to live in a house like this that so many donors made possible for us to have and be able to call home. That being said this house has a different feel from the old MFL house.
For those of you who don’t know, the MFL house was what HOLD used to be. Before we changed our name we were known as the Modern Foreign Language house and was actually located in the same spot as where our current house is. I was accepted to join the Modern Foreign Language house during the second semester of my freshman year after slush week. When I got into the house, they invited me over and I walked up onto a gray porch where I was greeted by all the housemates who chose to welcome me into their literal home. This moment wasn’t quite like anything I had ever experienced. See growing up in a city like Stamford, CT is a little different then growing up in most cities because of the layout of the city itself.
Stamford manages to have the perfect combinations of small suburban town on the North & South side and boisterous bubbly city in the downtown area. I grew up in the downtown area so I had grown accustomed to living in apartments all my life, however, all my friends lived on either north side or south side so whenever I went to visit them I’d see their nice houses with lots of yard space and I grew envious; I wondered why all my friends got to have a house with stairs that they could walk up to get to their rooms, my Mother just told me it was easier for us to have an apartment and that maybe one day we could move into a house. Of course at that time I didn’t really understand the complexities behind our situation, I just wanted a house. Fast forward 10 years later and I finally got my childhood dream, a house that I could call my own. But this wasn’t just any old house. This house was full of life and personality, it was falling apart and might’ve been potentially haunted by the ghost of a bat, but it was my haunted house. It’s strange how you could walk into a house and feel all of the history of the house from the second you walk in, but it was a feeling like no other.
Unfortunately, that house was eventually torn down and was replaced by a new house that doesn’t quite have the same feel behind its walls; but I did learn one thing, while I may have lost my house, I did not lose my home. My home is and will always be with the other members of my SLU, these walls don’t have a story to tell just yet, but we will create these stories ourselves, just as we have for years.
