Smithies are scattered around the world, some continuing the unpredictable journey of online learning, some finding other ways to take advantage of, or at least manage, this strange time. The spaces we inhabit have a significant impact on who we are. We spoke with three Smithies who, in their own unique ways, have built a home for themselves while Smith’s campus remains closed to the majority of students.
Jessica Brown (tentatively class of 2023), who is taking the semester off, has found more than just a community of like minded activists through her work with the Sunrise Movement. She is currently located in Ansonia, CT
where she shares a house with five other Sunrise organizers from several different schools – half from Texas, and half from her home state of Massachusetts.
Brown became involved with climate activism the minute she arrived at Smith – she started out with Divest Smith College and then attended a Sunrise event in Springfield, Mass. later on. After getting involved locally in her hometown over last summer, she joined the newly formed Sunrise hub at Smith that was born shortly before Smith was shut down last March. Now, she’s a hub coordinator for Smith’s chapter of the movement. She met her current housemates, coincidentally, on a shared Slack channel for organizing.
A fellow activist asked whether anyone was considering taking time off from school, and whether they were interested in a shared living situation to work on organizing together. “I commented and I was like, hell yes!” Brown said.
They narrowed their group down to those who were interested and began the search — looking all over New England, before finally settling in Ansonia. They moved in in phases starting in late August, in order to maintain quarantine. When I spoke with Brown, she had only been living there a little more than a week.
While Brown expressed some minor trepidation over moving in with people she had only spoken with online, she said, “It’s been more comfortable than I thought it would be.” She feels as though they are all really compatible housemates. “It hasn’t been 100% perfect,” she said, but even though it’s an entirely new situation she feels more familiar with them already.
While they all are organizing for their own home institutions (and sometimes on a national level), Brown and Sunrise at Smith have benefited from this collaboration. One of her housemates offered to do a training for Smith’s hub. In addition, she’s been fervently working on election activism, particularly campaigning for politicians who are Green New Deal champions.
Outside of this work, Brown is taking an online introductory Yiddish course (along with a few others). “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said. She fills her days with online pilates classes, walks around town, cooking and cleaning the house, and organizing for Sunrise.
Although she’s only been there a short while, she and her housemates have been able to create a home-like environment. One thing has really stood out to her:“I was fasting for Yom Kippur and my housemates were like, ‘we’re gonna make you anything you want for dinner because we want you to break the fast in a way that’s nice to you. Whatever you want, we’ll make it.’ That was really lovely.”
They’ve been apple picking and taken hikes and walks together. “We explored this abandoned factory, and that’s the place that’s stuck with me the most,” she said. In general, Brown loves what she’s seen of Ansonia. “It’s the first place I’ve lived that hasn’t been fully gentrified,” she said, “It’s been very different from any place I’ve ever lived before.”
The day that she arrived in Ansonia her housemates dubbed “Jessica Day,” and they celebrated by throwing a little party – still socially distancing, but making it fun. Brown is grateful for the opportunities she’s had during this time. “In terms of my life, I feel good about it. I’ve been able to get a lot of cool things done,” she said. Now, she can “really fight for the climate in a way that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get to do until after college,” she said.
But overall, the pandemic remains a constant haze in her life. She mentioned how the U.S. has recently reached 200,000 deaths from COVID-19. “I would give a lot to undo that,” she said. “I’m grateful to be a Smith student, overall I’m just grateful to be a college student right now.” She plans to stay in Ansonia till December and is still unsure concerning her plans for the spring.
Jenna Stanley, who just finished her sophomore year, is also taking a semester off, and potentially this whole academic year. Last March her parents came to pick her up at Smith for spring break. Instead of going to Florida as they had planned, they loaded up all her belongings and went home to Manasquan, New Jersey, where she’s been ever since.
Stanley now lives in her childhood home with her two retired parents and two pets. Initially, this transition was very challenging, “I had spent a year and a half learning how to live on my own,” she said.
For one, being back in her childhood bedroom wasn’t very conducive to the work she was doing. “I’m usually good about my sleep hygiene,” Stanley said. At Smith she never did homework in her room in order to separate her academic life from her personal space. Now she’s been taking Zoom calls at her desk in her bedroom for the past several months.
Additionally, Stanley struggled with managing her family’s dynamic. Living with two retired parents who spend most days at home after experiencing the independence that college brings was difficult. “I think people underestimate the time it takes to get readjusted to a living situation you were out of and then have to return to,” she said, “I resisted a lot at first.” Since March, this dynamic has improved — “Taking that energy to reinvest what this new relationship with my parents looks like was really valuable,” she said.
Over the summer Stanley was able to complete her internship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (NOAA) As an Environmental Science & Policy major, coastal ecosystems are her passion. While the internship was entirely remote, she was still able to work on a project that will go towards a lawsuit against the Diamond Alkali Company that is responsible for over a century of pollution in the Passaic River in New Jersey. “It really opened up what practical science looks like,” she said.
Stanley has been lucky enough to continue work she is passionate about from her home in New Jersey – now that her official internship is over, she will even be able to go into the physical lab a few hours a week to continue assisting with their research. But living back home in the shoretown of Manasquan, things look very different than they had before.
Over the summer she witnessed thousands of tourists flocking to Manasquan to escape cramped cities, a feeling only heightened by the pandemic. It was crowded, and proved challenging to find places to meet with friends. “We were probably at max five miles apart, but we still wanted to be together,” she said. They held socially distanced bonfires and Zoom birthday calls. A close friend from high school fell ill with the virus, and although she has since recovered, this was the first time the pandemic had touched Stanley’s life so closely. “This person that I would die for is really sick, and you don’t know what’s going to happen because they still don’t know anything really about the virus.”
But there’s still some comfort to be found in home. While her bedroom has since been renovated from its elementary and middle school pink and green color scheme, Stanley has unearthed old journals, an old point and shoot camera, her first phone, and her old iPod touch. “It’s a nice reminder of all the memories,” she said.
Outside of her home there are places that remind her of what it was like to live year round in a shoretown. “My town has a small recycling center, and right on the other side of it there’s a wooded, small park. It has this really strange set up of curved monkey bars, and then slides, all separate from each other, and then some swings. They used to have a really kind of creepy looking merry-go-round. My friend Cassidy and I, all through high school and into college – up until they removed the merry-go-round last year, it was dangerous – in the summer and early fall we would take walks late at night and go there.” Stanley explained how they would sit and talk, and sometimes spin on the merry-go-round as fast as possible. “Right above it there was a little clearing in the trees, and you could see the stars, so the stars would swirl, too … no one ever goes there.”
“It’s not particularly beautiful or anything, it’s just one of those places where you’re like, yeah, that’s the place,” she said.
While Stanley isn’t sure what her plans are for next spring and beyond (down to her class year, as much as she loves the number 2022), she’s learned a lot from the last few months. “There’s so many things that you can do with the time that you’re given. I’m glad that I don’t feel as limited by that as I did pre-COVID, actually.”
Sam Grossman – who is most likely going to be a member of the class of 2023 – is taking a gap year. She currently lives at home in Richmond, VA, where she moved to in 2011 from Boston. While her high school self didn’t love Richmond, her college self is learning to like it. “Since being sent home in March I’ve actually grown to really enjoy being here,” she said.
In high school, she spent most of her time at her house, at school, and at her dance studio, where she spent quite a bit of time studying ballet. “High school me was super busy, super stressed, all the time,” she said. Consequently, she wasn’t all too familiar with Richmond as a city. “I didn’t really feel super connected to the city,” she said. Since moving home, that’s changed. “I feel like I have a more tangible relationship with the city.”
For one, the summer internship she’d landed was cancelled due to the pandemic, forcing her to look for other ways to fill her time. She scooped ice cream for a few months, but had to quit because she didn’t feel entirely safe with the measures the shop had instituted. Now, as a self designed cultural geography major, she works part time at a historic garden. “I love plants, I love gardening, I love historic landscape design and all that nerdy stuff.” She hopes to start an internship soon with Historic Richmond, an organization that specializes in preservation and advocacy work, where she will learn more about the city she inhabits.
“I’m experiencing the city in different ways than when I was younger,” Grossman said, Visiting the James River is a popular activity for Richmond residents, and while she never had time in high school, now she bikes there periodically and goes swimming or sunbathing on the rocks by the bank. “One of my favorite things to do at night is go on walks,” she said. She lives in a historic neighborhood where alleys run behind most of the houses, some with small gardens attached to them. “I like exploring the alleys because they’re quiet and there’s not a lot of people. Sometimes they’re really cute, sometimes they’re really not. I’ll just dance around in there, and that feels really good,” she said. “Me with my earbuds in, just dancing around the alleys of Richmond at 8 pm. Nothing weird about that at all!” She expressed how much she misses the human connection that dance classes at Smith provide, so you could say the alleys provide a temporary solution.
Returning to Richmond has proven complicated for Grossman, too. Her family recently sold her childhood home and moved into a rental, and while she claimed this contributes to her positive feelings towards the city, it was an emotional experience. When packing up her old house she said, “it literally felt like unearthing all these versions of myself and reckoning with them.” Even outside of her home there are places that she frequented at different times in her life that hold strong memories, like her high school and dance studio. “All of these versions of myself were in front of me all the time and I was like, I can’t deal with you guys right now, go away!”
When wondering whether she should take time off from school this year, Grossman said, “the thought came to my head, and I scared myself. That’s scary, that’s unknown. It was never an option that I had ever considered for myself before.” Ultimately she said, “maybe I would get a lot more out of my last two years at Smith if I took a break.” Now, she said, “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. It’s exciting, it’s weird, it’s unpredictable, it’s scary – yeah, gonna emphasize that – scary.”
That’s one thread that connects these three stories, and in many ways, the stories of all current Smithies – what to do when every expectation you had for your life is altered. As Jenna Stanley said, “I always know that Smith is kind of there, and it will always be there, and I’ll get there eventually, but I think, you know, in a certain sense I feel very alone.” The places we inhabit do impact who we are, and our sense of self. It’s hard to say when any of us will inhabit Smith again as we once did, but for now, we learn to exist in other places and spaces, and create a home that works for us.
Thanks to Serena Keenan for her contribution to this article.
