Kelli Hardy: Left Unattended

It was an uncomfortable 65 degrees. It was just cold enough to make me shiver when I was still, but warm enough to make me sweat, when I was walking quickly and dragging a forty-five pound suitcase. Between midnight and four am, JFK airport closes down all the terminals but one. One of the international terminals is left open, and within it the only thing left open is McDonalds. This means that everyone who was too frugal, as I was, to get a hotel is now crowded into this dim open space, trying to get close to the light shining from McDonalds, like moths to flames. These were my first clues that I was in a space, and I was supposed to be moving in and out of it, but not stationary within it.

I had a sixteen-hour layover at the JFK airport, and after an entire summer abroad I had just enough money for a McChicken and small fries, with $1.43 left to spare. There are chairs, tables and a few padded benches filled with sleeping people. I was one of the latecomers, so I had to sit in one of the metal chairs, surrounded by my belongings, nervously scoping out the other people sitting, and enviously eyeing the people asleep on the benches. At this time in my journey I had already read all of the books I had brought with me, I began to scope out where I could get a couple hours of rest before the last two flights of my journey home. The tables were too tall, the chairs too hard, and the people around me too suspicious. That’s what an airport is: a place of suspicion. There are the constant messages to report baggage left unattended and some person calmly saying the security level is orange today, (I don’t think anyone actually knows what that entails, but it sounds frightening). They discourage people from trusting the person across from you, which in turn makes the development of relationships with strangers in airports difficult. By discouraging relationships, they are discouraging attachments, especially emotional ones to this large space.

I finally decided the floor by a store window in a dim corner was the best place to rest, because I would only have to protect one side. I lay on top of my suitcase, hugged my carry-on to my chest, put my passport, wallet and phone in the inner pocket of my zipped jacket, and put my purse under my head. As soon as I lay down I began to shiver, and I would wake myself up every twenty minutes, to check on my belongings. It was uncomfortable, and cold. I gave up after three hours, and dragged my things back to one of the metal chairs, where I put in headphones and observed my surroundings.

The interior of the terminal I was in was sterile. Everything could be summed up as white, metal, or tile. It was a hard and harsh place. It was meant to be. People are not supposed to stay in airports, or feel at home. They are just places of transit. It is from one place to another place, but you are never supposed to stay. Staying in a place that is meant to overturn people every few hours is jarring. You become familiar with the people sitting around you and then ten minutes later they are on their way to another state or country. An airport is designed to move people, and I was not moving. I felt as though I had angered the beast, it was trying everything it could to make me uncomfortable enough to leave. People do not go to an airport just to grab a cup of coffee and hang out with friends. They go there with a purpose, and once one loses their purpose the entire experience becomes even less desirable.

The entire time I was in the terminal I was eagerly awaiting the opening of another terminal. As soon as I was there, I would hurry through security, down the endless hallways, and follow the blue signs, just so I could sit in another waiting room, where I would eagerly await a plane that would only take me to another airport. Each step brought me closer to my ultimate destination, but each step was just as monotonous as the others. Bachelard says, “every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color” (38). I strongly dislike airports, but some airports try to distinguish themselves from others and make their inhabitants feel like they are in more of a place than space. An airport in North Carolina has white rocking chairs and potted plants, the one in Memphis has colorful murals on the walls, but in the end they all feel the same. There are shops and restaurants, but those can only provide entertainment for so long. There are TVs on the wall reporting the news, and if a person sits under the same one long enough they can see the same news report four times. After a while all of the airports, terminals, and gates begin to blend together. They have few things to distinguish them, and that is the point. Airline travel has become so homogeneous that by the time you land, you can’t quite remember the color of the seat you were sitting on for five hours.

After being in a space for so long, it is refreshing to be in a place, even if it is a car. It is the familiarity of the interior place that is comforting. It is jarring to spend sixty hours in transit. I knew that I had been travelling for days, but it didn’t feel as though I had moved six inches the entire time. This may be because of the diversity of people in airports, especially the international terminals. There are thirty different languages, hundreds of different accents. After a while it becomes so diversified I was not sure which country I was leaving and which one I was going to. I spent a lot of time wondering where home was for the thousands of people I had never met. I knew I had crossed the ocean and was in a different continent, but for all I was concerned the voice over the speakers telling me to never leave my baggage unattended had just shifted accents from British to American.

Jessica Burson: My Time Capsule

Home is a very special place. Home is where the family is, where memories are made, but that does not have to be a child’s parent’s house, it can be grandma and grandpa’s. For me, the house I lived in with my family is special, but my grandparent’s house holds an even softer spot in my heart. Their house is located in Chillicothe, Missouri. High school students built the house thirty years ago. The Moffatt family was the first, and the only family to live in the house. I do not remember too many details about the first house I lived in when I was growing up, but I know everything about my grandparent’s house. Their house is a place because I hold a very intimate emotional connection to it, unlike a space, which I would not.

The house structurally would be classified as a space. It has four bedrooms and four bathrooms. The outside is the common brick and permanent siding with a two-car garage. Many houses are built like this one. There are no emotional connections to the basic structure and layout of the house, it is just a space to live inside of. The house itself is not symbolic of anyone or of anything; it is just a place of residence.

What makes a space become a place is what is associated with the house. It is the smells, the feelings, and the sounds that create the emotional connections I have to the house, which makes it a place. The house always smells like ham baking in the oven, or chocolate cookies. When I smell chocolate chip cookies baking, it makes me think of my grandparent’s house. Because of these smells I have a connection to the house, the house alone does not smell like anything memorable. To accompany the smells, I can always hear coffee brewing and sports playing on the television. Many people drink coffee and watch sports, but they are connected to this house because they are always present when I am there. The fact that these sounds are heard in this house, and that they impact my experiences while I am in that house makes it a place.

My emotional connections come from the people in my family and not the objects themselves, but they impact one another. I have memories of my grandparents and other family members involving objects in the house, which creates an emotional connection for me with those objects. The fact that the house is what holds these impactful objects makes the house a place; a space does not have anything I am connected to in it.

In the entry way there is a grandfather clock. Every Christmas morning I would lie in bed and listen for the chimes to know when I could finally get out of bed. There is a recliner in the living room that my grandpa sits in all the time, no matter what. I do not think anyone will sit in that chair once he is gone. My grandma has a china tea set that was passed down from her grandma, that means more than anything in the world to her. In the living room there is an ugly gold ceramic snail, which every grandchild has broken through the years. But, she just glues it back together and puts it back in its place on the coffee table. I could go on and on about objects that have special meaning because there is so much. But, my connection to the house explains my emotions for everything inside of the house. The house is just the physical object that I can connect all of my memories to.

An inside place is much more intimate than an outdoor place. The idea of the house just seems cozy and sentimental. It is a smaller more concrete place I feel like. The outdoors seems to have endless connections connected to it, but a house is personal. My grandma has given me things that used to be hers, and they do mean a lot to me, but the house is permanent, or at least semi-permanent. The house is never going to move or change very drastically. Objects can be lost or broken or thrown away, but not the house. The reason that the house holds so much emotional connection is because that is where everything happened, that is where the objects gained their importance, without that place, nothing else would hold the meaning that it does. The house is a home and place. My grandparents live there, my mom was mostly raised there, and I have spent every single holiday there, and many weekends. That house is the gathering place for the extended family, where stories are retold, and birthday parties are held. It is a safe haven, play ground, movie theatre, and restaurant. The house is versatile and holds many secrets and many stories. It has seen happy days and sad days, and yet it still looks the same. The house is the one place that always makes me feel safe and happy. It is the place I long for when I am home sick. Once my grandparents are gone, that house will still hold their memories. That house is like a time capsule. It holds all the memories and connections that I have of my life. I may not be able to remember an event or incident on a regular basis, but just being in that house or thinking about it, helps me recall.

A place is a special location that a person has an emotional connection to. My connection to my grandparent’s house is deep and is about more than one happy memory; it is a lifetime of happy memories. This place makes me feel apart of something, and reminds me that I am never alone; I will always have reminders of the people in my life. A space is a location that you can go through and never think of again, but a place never leaves you. Even after my grandparents are long gone, and another family lives in that house, it will still be a place to me. Just because the people are gone, does not mean that my connection to the house is gone, it will never go away.

Darren Orf: A Small Room and a Tsunami

I was tired, hungry and wanted to sleep for days. 16 hours spent in airports and on planes was enough to send me into a travel coma. I rushed through customs and prayed to the air travel gods that my baggage arrived safely. I wasn’t aware of my surroundings until I exited baggage claim and stared into hundreds of unfamiliar faces, that I realized I wasn’t at home anymore. If fact, I was 9,000 miles from it in Nagoya, Japan.
Luckily my host mother, who had seen my picture from my application, was able to recognize me and help me navigate the incredibly complicated train system. The worst time to realize that you barely understand Japanese is when you are in Japan. I was at a crisis. Everything was completely foreign: the signs, the language and even using public transportation was new. The windows were pitch black outside the train and offered no shelter from the awkward, broken conversation I was having with my host mother.

After an hour, we arrived in Kasugai, Japan, a small town outside of Nagoya. I ascended seven flights of stairs and walked into my home for the next four months. It was small three-person apartment. Several rooms branched from the hallway. At the end of the hallway was a family/dinning room, which had a knee-high table and a tube television. My room was the first on the right. I slipped out of my shoes at the entryway and opened the door. It wasn’t much. Just a small, 8-by-10 foot room with a desk, closet and a floor mattress, known as an ofuton (more commonly known as a futon). There was a sliding window where I often heard children playing in the dirt field across the street. There were also remnants of past tenants and students that had lived there including books, magazines and a wireless router. I unpacked my things; I lay down and tried to absorb everything that had happened and what was going to happen next.

Over the next couple of weeks, that small 80-square-foot room evolved from a space to a place. I had moved in, grown comfortable. It didn’t look much different from when I moved in besides a pile of clothes and a few pictures of friends and relatives. This detail is particularly interesting in comparison with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. He states that these poetic spaces “must go beyond that problem of description” (4). The fact that the room’s appearance remained the same, but its function from a space to a place indicates that physical description cannot accurately describe the place in which a person creates an attachment. It is a description that surpasses the physical and enters the intangible realm or feeling, memory and emotion.

However, this place invoked an interesting reaction from me. In my room, I wanted to read and write more. It was a shelter from a world in which I was considered the Other. I was at ease in this small space. It was a place that I could gather my thoughts and work through culture limitations that I was experiencing. It was a small place in a country that I considered a large space. Bachelard states that “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (6) In reflection, an interesting dynamic appears between my room and the view from my room’s window. From the window I could see foreign architecture, strange signs and a different landscape.

However, I observed this place from my seventh-floor room. The view was a constant reminder that I was the Other in this country and that the room that I inhabited was the only place I could call my own.

To expand on this thought, I think it can be said that every person has this type of place. Not to say in such broad terms that they own a house but that every person has a place to go to do serious thinking or a place that invokes such thinking or as Bachelard would term “daydreaming.” I find it interesting how important this place was for me. I entered a space where everything was foreign and I searched for a space that I could claim as a place, like it was an intrinsic need.

In early November, a Tsunami struck the Japanese main island. It was the worse storm I have ever experienced. Trains were derailed, cars flipped over and the city was shutdown for most of the following day. I remember lying on my futon as the wind howled down the corridor outside my window. It was so loud as so vivid that it kept me restless throughout the night. Late into the night, I finally managed to fall asleep. I feel that this is analogous to my experience of space and place in a foreign country. The storm didn’t represent bad, violent or painful experience of my time in Japan, but rather just experiences themselves. Everyday, my senses were assaulted by a new culture. New experiences were redefining who I was, what I thought about the world and what I thought about others. It was chaotic, uninhibited. It was a storm. My room, as Bachelard explained, “protected” me from this storm. It gave me a type of anchor and helped me gain a perspective on my experiences and myself.

Bachelard argues that these “poetic spaces” go beyond description and into emotion and memory. That is definitely at work in this small place. It wasn’t different than any other room in the apartment. Just four white walls, a wood floor and a window but I don’t describe it as such. It’s more of place in which I struggled with Japanese homework or played guitar for my host mother. In Japan, I traveled everywhere I could afford. I saw sumo wrestling in Tokyo. Rode bullet trains past Mt. Fuji. Went to Peace Park in Hiroshima. I saw Meoto Iwa in Mie. Despite all these experiences and trips, it was that 8-by-10 space that I remember the most.

Amanda Koellner's Inside Place Essay

As my heavy eyelids slowly let the light in, my dream-like state led me to wonder if I was in a cloud. The blinds were closed, but there was space between each one, like someone had forgotten to twist the hard beige rod to keep the outside world from revealing itself. I pulled my fleece blanket over my head for a minute; its warmth was lovely compared to the cold dorm room. When I removed it, I smiled while looking at my alarm clock and pushed the “off” button just as it began to buzz. As I sat up, I realized I was not in a cloud but that the area of campus surrounding my eighth-floor dorm room was covered in a blanket of bright white snow. I climbed to my knees and pressed my forehead through the blinds, onto the cold glass and watched as each huge flake descended below me. It was then that I decided class simply was not an option. It was then I decided I would spend the day lying in my bed with Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas album transcending through my speakers and a book I had checked out the previous week from the Columbia Public Library in my hands. It was a Monday morning and my roommate still wasn’t back from her weekend at home, so I was all alone in my “little corner of the world” with nothing to do but enjoy the simple pleasures of a solitary day in my bedroom (Bachelard 4).
When thinking back to my time in the dorm in which I lived my freshman year at Mizzou, I can laugh at the many, many drunken shenanigans, shudder at the thought of eating Ramen Noodles far too often and nostalgically think of the fun times with my roommate, Angela (who I was immensely lucky to have been randomly placed with). So much happened in the room, that when my friends and I are telling stories from that crazy first year of college, I don’t often bring up the day I finished an entire book while peacefully watching the snow fall. But¬¬ it might actually be what I cherish most about living in a tiny space on the eighth floor of an old dormitory.
Hubbard defined a place as “a distinctive location defined by the lived experiences of people” (Hubbard 41) and equated it with security and enclosure. That room is one of my most cherished places. Consequently, it was the first place that was really my own. I’ve always had my own room at my parents’ house, even a room that I would consider “mine” at both of my grandparents’ homes. There is just something about being all on your own that fosters an unthinkable connection to the place in which you live. The linoleum floors were unpleasant, the light brown dresser and desk made my interior design-loving mother shudder and the closet space was far from ample. However, none of these things really mattered. Bachelard wrote that “over-picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy” and this has rang true for me in not only my dorm room, but also both of the shabby East Campus apartments I’ve occupied here in Columbia (Bachelard 12). The perfect room or the perfect apartment isn’t fostered through pristine hard-word floors or granite countertops, but through the memories made in each place.
Bachelard wrote that “real houses of memory… do not readily lend themselves to description” and I could not help but think of this when attempting to define my dorm room with descriptive language. While I can write all of the physical characteristics of the room, it is literally just like any other dorm room in the country, or the world for that matter and probably carries little meaning to others. We have all either lived in one or visited one, and on the surface there is truly nothing special about such spaces. It is the memories and the feeling of the room that make it a place to me but maybe just a space to others. Bachelard explained that although we can attempt to mentally put a person in our own places, “the values of intimacy are so absorbing” that the person will cease to see the room we are describing, but see their own again. I know I am not the only person to feel nostalgia and love for their first dorm room, however, in describing both the physical characteristics and the emotional attachments, I’m sure I could take any reader back to their version of my experience, in a state of “suspended reading” (Bachelard 14).
I do think it’s interesting, then, to think about the few months over the summer when my former dorm room doesn’t belong to anyone. I believe it can be seen by those who have never lived in it as a space. I was filled with a strange sense of sadness sophomore year when I thought about a new freshman occupying my former home. I knew that not only would someone else occupy it, but someone else would begin to feel the same attachment to it as I felt and begin to fill it with their own thoughts and dreams. Although I agree with Bachelard when he says the house is “one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind,” I can’t help but question what happens when a house’s occupants are forced to move on and relocate. Specifically, what happens when the group of students who have created a home for themselves dismantle their posters, empty their closets of the shoes and party dresses and stack up the books that have carried them through the year? Perhaps this is because I’m a senior and nostalgia is heavily setting in, but the empty dorm room is such a sad concept for me, and certainly an interesting merge of space and place.
With all of this being said, I do believe I could walk into 802 Lathrop Hall and see someone else’s posters on the wall, a different bedspread strewn across the mattress and perhaps bunked beds instead of the layout Angela and I chose and still smile, feeling the warmth of memory overcome me. “Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality of those of the home,” and I believe despite changes in occupants and the physical characteristics, it is the memories we create in interior spaces that make them places (Bachelard 6). Those memories, although concrete and fleeting, can never be taken away from us; therefore, the place will always remain a place. That dorm room will always remind me of the careless fun I had and the peacefulness of solitude within the room I felt on that snowy Monday in 2007.

Paul Judge's Interior Place Essay

My dream is to make music. Over the past seven years, I have become very good and very efficient at making instrumentals and producing hip hop music, so much so that when I met one of my best friends, Kyle Parks, a.k.a O.V., and began making music with him my freshman year at Mizzou, I became convinced that producing music was my true talent in life and that I should pursue it despite all protest from parents, friends, teachers, etc. So the summer after my freshman year, I moved to O.V.’s house in St. Louis to pursue our mutual dream of making it in the music world.

We worked eight-hour shifts by day at the Forest Hills Country Club in Chesterfield, and would come back to O.V.’s house at night and make music in his room. However, the sound quality was bad, the air conditioning was broken, and the room was cramped and claustrophobic with wires, keyboards, computers, and headphones strewn all across the floor. So we moved our operation to the basement and built an 8’ x 4’ vocal booth and a mixing station, simply dubbing it “the studio.” The studio became an arena for my dreams and my fears, my desires and my insecurities, my love and my hate, and it is one of the most singularly important interior places I have ever and will ever encounter in my life.

I define the studio as a “place” because, while it does serve a functional purpose and is used as a “space” by others (when we invite guests over and charge them to record), to myself and to O.V., the studio is a very personal place that is as much defined by its physical dimensions as by the memories, emotions, and ideas that have been created, recorded, and produced within.

A large part of my sense of place associated with the studio comes from the feeling of ownership that I have, because O.V. and I worked extremely hard, often late into the night to build it. We cut the wood to build the support structures for the walls, spaced, measured, and nailed the studs, attached the several layers of insulation, built the roof, rigged the lighting, built the door, and soundproofed the entire booth. At the time, the last thing I wanted to do after coming home from an eight hour shift at the country club was work until four in the morning, building, cutting, and lifting materials, but when it was finally completed, the feeling of completion and ownership was worth the long weeks of toil. We had made our own place to make music, and no one in the world could interfere now with our creativity.

The vocal booth is basically a large wooden box. We built it into an enclave in O.V.’s basement that measured about twelve feet by six feet, so the booth takes up the majority of the space. From the outside, it looks like a large plywood cubicle. On the short side of the booth, we built a door that opens out into the small four-foot gap that we left for people to walk in and out of the booth. When we finally finished building it, we adorned it with spray paint, tagging our names and June 26^th, 2009, the day it was finally completed.

When you walk into the booth, you are immediately in a different world. The wavy, black corrugated foam that lines the entire booth gives a kaleidoscopic, mesmerizing effect, so it looks larger than it really is. Once you close the door behind you, you are in an airtight, echo-less chamber in which the only thing that you can hear is the sound of your own voice. There is one single fluorescent light that hangs from the ceiling, illuminating the small space completely. The only objects in the booth are the headphones, the mic stand, a stool for sitting during playback, and a mirror so you can look at yourself as you perform.

Because he was the rapper, O.V. spent the majority of time in the booth, while I spent most of my time at my mixing station. I set up an actual cubicle made of old partitions we found at the Salvation Army, with a desk, a small fluorescent light, and a shelf. The walls of the cubicle are at an angle from the booth, which helps to keep the audio from the large studio monitors from creeping in towards the mic. I spent the majority of my summer sitting in my chair, recording O.V., mixing and editing his voice, talking to him through the walls, and getting up and walking to the booth to make sure the door was sealed tight.

For the most part, though we did sometimes have sessions with other artists to make some money, the studio was by and large used as our creative playground. Anything goes in the studio, and the more time spent down there means more opportunity for the wildest ideas to come out. If something doesn’t work, fine, delete it – it’s our own studio, and we’re not paying for session time. Many nights, O.V. and myself would drink a few beers and a can of Monster and stay up until four or five a.m., working on tiny tweaks to background “oohs” and “uh huhs”. It was this limitless opportunity for creativity (interrupted only by the next shift at the country club) that really allowed us to develop our understanding of both of ourselves, not only as musical artists but as human beings.

The studio encourages freedom of expression and creativity, but really more than that, it encourages spontaneity and experimentation. If you go back and listen to our songs that we recorded, say, first semester of my freshman year at a commercial studio in downtown St. Louis, you will hear pretty simple, basic songs that are the result of having only one or two hours to get everything down. If you listen to the mixtape we produced that summer in the studio, O.V.’s The Fore-ward, you will hear a lush, diverse array of every single idea that we could fit into a sixteen song, 60 minute mixtape, because the studio gave us both the opportunity and the confidence to try out and test every concept and idea that came into our heads.

This freedom, combined with the countless memories and emotions, is really what makes the studio a “place” for me. I go back to St. Louis constantly, usually to record with O.V. and another rapper from Mizzou named Goone at Jupiter studios near SLU, but when we go back to O.V.’s, we always hit the studio to jot down some ideas or work on a few tweaks. I am always reminded of the late night sessions, of when I couldn’t quite get the echo right on an ad-lib on the hook and we were frustrated and tired and had to go to work in four hours, or when I went in and laid down the hook for our song “On My Way” and it came out so unique and perfect that we both freaked out and started jumping around the basement like little kids. The memories and emotions that are contained within the studio are always carried with me, and whenever I go back to St. Louis and sit in my old chair at my mixing station, and O.V. steps into the booth, I am, without a doubt, exactly where I should be - home.

Patrick Inside Space/Place Essay

“Why the F**K is it so cold?” I ask to an empty room, shivering profusely as I approach the thermostat in the living to check the temperature after waking up for class in the morning. My roommates had not yet awoken in the igloo that was our house.

It was a cold December morning at my house off Bearfield in Columbia, Missouri when I had woken up to a, at most, 45 degree house although the thermostat needle didn’t even go low enough to tell the temperature and a broke heater. But hey, at least I didn’t have to worry about the ants that had invaded our kitchen for the previous 2 months. Looking back on it, perhaps my optimistic, sarcastic personality might have said that to my roommates. But at this time, waking up in a house nearly cold enough to freeze the cup of water next to my bed may have been the worst morning over the course of the year I spent living in my first house away from home in St. Louis.

It was July 28 and I had survived a year with two other roommates in our own house without parents. The house as empty as when I first moved in (perhaps more empty after breaking a few chandeliers) and I thought back on all the events that had transpired in just 365 days. I kept thinking of memories, kept tugging for emotion, and awaiting a feeling that never came. I thought back to the “Friends” series finale on how emotional they got when they had to move out of their apartment. Granted that was “10 years” and television, but I waited for that sense of sadness.

It never came.

“Places” should extract emotion, right? A home should be considered a place, right? So why could I not find one ounce of emotion, or sadness for moving away? I mean, I even called it my place.

“Hey, do you guys just wanna come over to my place and play beer pong before the party?”
So perhaps not the same idea, but saying “Do you wanna come over to my “space” …” probably would not have gotten me the same response, but merely strange looks and a “WTF are you talking about?”

I digress. Nevertheless, 3520 Marquis Court, my first house away from parents was no place at all but simply a space for three college fraternity guys. A space for openness to be who they want to be, freedom from parents, freedom to act how they want to act. The actual location, structure of building, pictures on the wall meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. I had little emotional attachment to this house; it was just the first to give me an opportunity at freedom.
The ultimate question I ask myself to determine a space from a place, what does it consist of, what am I attracted to? If the answer involves “things” or items rather than the structure, view, or landscape, than how can that be a place? Am I truly attracted to the structure, emotionally attached to the building, or is it the things in the building? When the walls are stripped, the carpets cleaned and shampooed, the furniture moved on to the U-Haul, what do I see?

Before answering, I look around my room at my current house. Everything’s the same just moved around, my bedroom looks the same, so maybe that’s the “place.” But thinking back to the empty house I most recently moved out of, I saw flashbacks of memories, good and bad. I saw a house located in a good part of Columbia, but also located next to a trailer park. A house located on the same street that had three break-ins over Mizzou’s winter break last year.
Maybe some people consider memories and nostalgic feelings enough to make a house their “place.” Those same people might not have spent an entire essay talking about a house they lived in and not once mentioning it as their home. And again, perhaps that’s why I felt little emotion when I looked at my bare walled house on Marquis Court one last time.

3520 Marquis Ct., Columbia, MO. 65201, it took me a while to memorize the address (about 2 months and 10 pizzas ordered to the address), now it’s just a memory. When my dad came down to Columbia to move me out, he lifted up my marble coffee table and noticed a wheel missing on the bottom, stains from alcohol and who knows what on top, and told me it looked like the table had been through Hell. Then he looked to my mom and said something along the lines of, “If this table could talk, I bet it’d tell quite a story.”

As soon as we moved the table, I thought back to the party that got out of hand ending with a fight and a hole in my kitchen wall. The half drank beer ball my roommate bought over spring break in Panama City and the broken garbage disposal from a shot glass unknowingly falling down the sink. None of these memories could have come without the freedom of my own “space.”

Several people talk of their home away from home. I have never really agreed with that statement. Growing up in St. Louis, I never seemed to fit in with the St. Louis mentality, it never seemed like a home no matter how great my family was or the house I lived in. In Columbia, Missouri I don’t know that I have found that idea of a home yet either. But someday, some house will feel like a home. That day, and only that day will I then consider a house my “place.” For now, I still count on those stories from my “space” about why I’m good at fixing holes in dry wall, half-kegs are a little too big for two people on a Wednesday night and training on your 20th birthday for the 21 shots on your 21st is a questionable decision. And if I ever want to remember more stories, I still have that marble coffee table.


***AS for pictures or video, I didn't really have any good pictures of the place except from parties, and I don't live there anymore so I couldn't record any video.***

Garland, "Up the Coulee" and Bachelard

--Bachelard argues that "all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home" (5) and that this sense of shelter fosters the imagination producing dreams and poetry. Reflecting upon your own memories and experiences, to what extent does this ring true? Or do you find it philosophical mumbo-jumbo?

--In Garland's story, there is a lot of attention to descriptions of the landscape and experiences of the landscape. Garland poses the aestheticized gaze of the artist/tourist against the familiar gaze of those living in upper Midwest. What are the explicit and implicit lessons of this comparison?

--Garland's story poses the success of one brother against the failure of another, raising classic issues within American life about 'self-made' men and 'success stories.' By the classic logic of American self-making and/or success, those who work harder and/or are smarter succeed, while failure reflects an individual's inadequacy. How does this story weigh in on the classic story of American success?