"Here Having Been There" spotlights socioeconomic diversity of students' roots

Here Having Been There: Andrew Cushing ’12 revisits childhood trailer home

For the next four weeks, the Orient is featuring a selection of students’ essays about their homes, in conjunction with the “Here Having Been There” photo exhibit, opening April 8 in the basement of the Visual Arts Center.
Last summer, my brother and I began the process of tearing down our childhood home. It is a strange feeling to forever reduce your house to a pile of copper (to sell), metal and glass (to recycle), and wood (to burn). Slivers of guilt erupted each time I jettisoned armfuls of memory-infused popcorn ceiling, but a greater part of me relished the fact that my best-kept secret was disappearing from the landscape. After all, this home defined how I saw myself and how others categorized me growing up: as trailer trash.
Yet, it is really my only home. After my parents’ divorce, I found myself living in a metaphorical mobile home. My high school and college years included stays between several beds and couches, including one in this trailer (at the time home to my brother). Consequently, I was ripping out fiberglass insulation from the thin walls of my only true home with mixed emotions.
The more I delved into its innards, the angrier I grew at how cheaply it was constructed. Staples and glue affixed every piece of faux wood paneling and molding to studs with the dimensions of matchsticks. I could not shake the idea that the trailer’s worn linoleum flooring somehow reflected my family as equally cheap, flimsy and temporary.
I looked out across the fields where my father, brother and I had spent summers haying. My family’s 50 acres is the closest thing I have to a home. Here I learned tree identification and woodlot management. It was where my siblings and I raced to Mom after getting barbed wire stuck in our legs or concussions from sledding off barn roofs. It was where I contemplated life (as a 13-year-old knows it), my feet dangling in the gelid waters of our property’s moss-blanketed streams.
I could say that this trailer on a dirt road in rural New Hampshire taught me many of the values I appreciate in myself and in others. Home in the physical sense is not that powerful, though. No, it is my parents I wish to thank. My parents did the best with what they had, and gave me a humble resourcefulness that guides me through a world so unlike the one in which I grew up. My brother and I will finish razing the trailer this upcoming summer. By then, this image will be the only vestige of my childhood home. And I’m fine with that.

Here Having Been There: Sarah Johnson ’13 calls boarding house her home

My house makes a pretty great home. It was a boarding house run by nuns sometime in the 19th century, and it sits in the woods in the out-of-the-way neighborhood of Lanesville in Gloucester, Mass.
My dad’s side of the family (the Johnsons, formerly known as the Ojantakanens) has been in this house on Woodbury Street ever since the nuns left—I am something like the sixth generation to live in these hallowed halls (though they’re actually more hollowed by squirrels than anything else). When my dad was growing up, the family bathed in a tin washtub, used an outhouse in the backyard and tended to an ailing grandmother named “Nunni,” who I always imagine looked much like Grandma Georgina in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” My dad grew up sharing a twin bed with all three of his siblings. As various relatives died and my father’s siblings moved away, he decided to return home for good.
My paternal grandmother kept the ground floor of the house in its original form all her life. My dad, however, had bigger plans. As he and my mother began their life and family, he started blowing out walls, putting up beams, wiring new outlets, running new plumbing and bringing our house into the 20th century. He built a set of stairs up to the second floor so my grandmother could have her own door, and a porch facing the yard and the woods for enjoying long, warm summers. I recently asked him how he knew how to do all of that, and he said, “Well, I knew how to read.” Kudos on that one Dad.
Despite our determined efforts to bungle around in the present, my house is always bringing up the past. Our house is built on the old type of foundation: rocks that were just there, in the ground, that seemed steady enough to build on. Inevitably, our house shifts and moves, like the earth. Our dingy and cramped cellar is full of treasures—oil lamps, root-cellar style shelves, 4-inch-long nails and tools.
Of course, it’s also full of trash—lead paint, broken sets of croquet and old air conditioners. But what I love most are the stacks and stacks of old photographs, report cards, military service discharge papers, newspaper clippings and even an empty flour sack dating to 1856 we found under some floorboards. It’s no surprise, then, that when we were cleaning out my grandmother’s closet this summer, I found a strange, block-shaped stone with a plug in the bottom, and my dad reached for it saying, “Ah, Nunni! We’ve been looking for her!”
I know that I’ve been extremely lucky to have a home full of my family and full of my history. I am, as they say, #blessed.

Here Having Been There

"Here Having Been There" spotlights socioeconomic diversity of students' roots

April 3, 2014

“Home is not something we talk about very often here,” said Marta Misiulaityte ’14, one of the curators of the “Here Having Been There” exhibit that opens this Tuesday, April 8, in the basement of the Visual Arts Center.

On a college campus, the idea of “home” is a loaded one, as students adapt to new surroundings and leave family behind.

“We felt that people who come from similar low-socioeconomic backgrounds, like us, are underrepresented at Bowdoin, and their voices are not heard as much. We wanted to organize an exhibit that showcased places where people come from, in a very visual way,” said Misiulaityte.

The exhibit’s curators hope to display some of those origins and open up a conversation about the different places that students call home. They have received about 25 photos so far, and hope to reach about 40 in total, after the addition of photos from faculty and staff. All the photos will be displayed in black and white, but some will be different sizes.

“People tend to avoid conversations about class, because it’s such an uncomfortable topic. You get here and you’re supposed to be on a level playing field. Maybe people talk about their parents or siblings, but it’s hard to visualize,” said Misiulaityte.

Originally conceived as an exhibit exclusively focused on the homes of low-income students, “Here Having Been There” now attempts to represent the homes of all students and explore “how the definition of home differs,” according to Andrew Cushing ’12, the other curator of the exhibit.

The exhibit may have branched out from Misiulaityte and Cushing’s personal experiences to include a variety of different homes, but it still holds personal value for each curator. Misiulaityte will graduate this spring, and Cushing will leave Bowdoin for graduate school after two years of work as a sustainability outreach assistant.

“I’m leaving campus,” said Cushing. “There’s nothing for me to be ashamed of anymore. It’s taken me a long time to get to that point, but I feel comfortable sharing now, especially if it makes other students feel more comfortable about where they’re coming from.”

Cushing and his brother are currently tearing down their childhood home, a home of which he has no photos.

“That was kind of the impetus for me. How do you encapsulate that loss of childhood upbringing?” said Cushing.

Misiulaityte expressed a similar sentiment.

“Coming from a place of lower means, there’s a component of embarrassment, maybe even shame,” she said. “I thought, if my doing this will help some first years have more conversations about where they come from and the meaning of home, then I’m perfectly positioned to open up that conversation for them.”

The photographs in the exhibit are from a wide array of places, including Montana, Alaska, Lithuania and Nova Scotia.

“It’s fun to see the diversity, and sometimes, how similar some of the homes do look,” said Cushing.

Some students whose homes appear in the exhibit expressed a desire to explain their photo, while other students wanted their pictures to speak for themselves. One student explained that her home was her Bowdoin bedroom, because she had never had a permanent home outside of school.

“This is our visual contribution. I want to open these conversations up to everyone, make it less of a taboo thing to talk about,” said Misiulaityte.

Misiulaityte doesn’t think of this project as her parting gift to Bowdoin, but she did say that the project is one of her most personal endeavors.

“Being on ResLife, I was always doing programs for first years and residents,” she said. “I was always doing assignments for professors, but this feels like the first project coming out of a personal sense of urgency to make this happen.”

Cushing added that the exhibit does not just showcase the homes of poorer students, though students from more affluent backgrounds have been timid about putting forth their photographs.

“Privilege is embarrassing too, for some students,” said Cushing.

In working on the exhibit, Cushing and Misiulaityte partnered with the club the Undiscussed, which is orchestrating discussions about risk and comfort zones this semester.

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