Tufts Blogs

Sitting on a couch that none of us purchased. Sipping coffee that was brewed for no one in particular. Talking about things that matter deeply and things that matter very little. There is a particular kind of life that happens in the off-campus houses surrounding Tufts University - a life made not of grand events but of slow, shared ordinary time.

Our apartment is not beautiful in any conventional sense.

It is a room where the walls are covered in posters and torn magazine pages, placed there by people whose names we may never learn. In the kitchen hangs a tapestry of pandas whose origin has been lost to memory. None of us know how it arrived. None of us have seriously discussed removing it. Some objects, once they settle into a home, begin quietly insisting that they belong there.

There are fridge magnets carried from France, postcards from every corner of the world, and a hospital band that carries the memory of a night that makes us giggle every time we look at it.  

I have always thought that moving from dorm life into off-campus living changes a person in ways they cannot fully anticipate. Maybe it’s just the fact that suddenly, you have a real apartment to call your own. It is the discovery that your diet will gradually, almost politely, become Annie’s white cheddar shells and Impossible nuggets eaten under the soft glow of a kitchen lamp long after midnight.

Last summer, when I moved into my apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, I was met by two people who would shape the year and the rest of my time at Tufts, who have grown to be two of my closest friends.

Whenever I give tours on the Hill, I speak about culture at Tufts, about how the school is ultimately defined by the people who move through it. Living in this apartment made that idea less like a statement and more like a daily experience.

Conflict, I have learned, is not unusual in shared living. What matters is not the absence of disagreement but the willingness to approach it slowly: to speak honestly, to listen carefully, and to assume, even when frustrated, that the other person is trying to do the same.

This semester was marked by several storms that people jokingly called “once-in-a-generation” blizzards. And the truth is: there is a particular intimacy to snowbound living. The world outside becomes indistinct and quiet, pressed softly against the windows. Inside, we cook, talk, study, and inhabit the strange stillness that winter makes possible. And there is a lot of hot chocolate!

The house itself carries a history that predates the three of us.

It has passed through communities - frisbee players, soccer players, wilderness orientation leaders - people who stayed briefly and then moved upward into other lives. At one point, the lead singer of a popular local band lived here. We continue to receive her jury duty summons as if the house remembers her more reliably than the state does.

Our apartment is objectively unremarkable. Three bedrooms with mismatched furniture that was assembled slowly from unknown origins and a kitchen where counter space functions more as aspiration than architecture.

And yet people return.

Sometimes they knock on the door. Sometimes they meet us at events and say, with a kind of quiet recognition, that they once lived here. The visits are often gentle, as if they are checking whether a younger version of themselves is still resting somewhere inside the doorway.

There is something moving about that continuity… so we leave small marks behind.

A copy of Jonathan Bailey’s People magazine cover is taped lightly to the wall and an Ariana Grande vinyl resting in the place where music seems most comfortable. A fresh coat of light green paint that our landlord may not have formally approved but that feels correct in afternoon sunlight. Each October, a large pumpkin stands on the front step. It is too heavy for just one of us to move.

My hope is that the people who live here after us will treat the apartment not as property but as a living archive of ordinary kindness. A place of conversations at 2 a.m., of snow melting slowly from boots left near the door, of laughter that starts quietly and becomes impossible to contain.

My found family is at Tufts. In twenty years, I hope I can return to the Hill and find students sitting in kitchens with decorations whose origins they do not know, drinking coffee they did not brew alone, carrying forward the strange inheritance of being part of a place that becomes, quietly, part of them.

Until next time,
Joe