our best year yet.
By Lauren Luther
There’s a certain charm about a college house. One that settles in the cracks and corners, collecting memories with every passing year. Every year, someone new. Something new for the house to try on- new voices echoing down the halls, new posters hung up on every wall, and someone promising our “best year yet.”
It stands by each year as it watches us pass through. For us, it’s a fleeting moment in our lives, that “one place I lived in senior year of college.” But the house keeps on giving, year after year, day after day. Giving us a place to lay for hours binge-watching the next best show together on a Sunday night. A place to try (and fail) at all those new recipes we’ve been meaning to test out. A place to host dinner parties hoping that one person walks through the doors the entire night. And when the inevitable calls, and those who once called this place home must go, it stands there bare and naked, waiting for the next story to walk through its doors.
The shoes piled high in the foyer, a fridge filled with more wine than food, Halloween decorations still hanging high in April. String lights on every surface, mismatched pillows crowding the couch, candles burning in every room. A quiet hum that sings through the entire house, the creaking doors and crooked staircase. Small pieces collected from five different lives, blending and colliding to make something they can all call home.
It gives us a place to be when we’re far away from what we know. The house never judges us for who we are, the friends we love, the mistakes we’ve made, or who we will become. But as the year passes by and the weather turns warmer the house starts to wonder - who will be next?
Because with each year, new life is breathed into the crooks and crannies and every part of this house. Its air is filled with comfort, energy, and uncertainty. The uncertainty that nothing here is ever permanent. The 4 minute walk to our best friends apartment, our favorite bagel shop we frequent every weekend, the shower that doesn’t run quite right, the too tight kitchen we can barely fit in. The things we love for one short year, we now must let go.
That is the charm of the college house. It’s not the beautifully hung decor or the picturesque interior, it's the memories of the late nights, the heartbreaks, the new friends, the old friends, the bad days and the plentiful good ones. It’s the people that walk through those doors every year imagining what kind of life they could build for themselves. It’s the days you spend inseparable from those you know soon you’ll have to say goodbye to. It’s the infectious happiness that seeps into the foundation of the house, growing stronger with every passing year.
As the days move on and the familiar faces start trickling out of our once too familiar college town, the house watches as we pack our lives up into tiny boxes, crammed into the backseats of tiny cars. It watches as we sit together on its big empty porch one last time, watching the sun fade from pink to orange. It watches because it knows, in a few months time, this will begin again. It will be dressed in new posters and pillows, new names will echo through the hallways, and someone new will call this place home again.
And when the last light turns off and only traces of us are left behind, the house stands still, waiting for someone else to call it home.
April 2025