After a month of freshman dormitory life, my roommate and I decided that there was no way we were living in a dorm the following year. We were amateur chefs and professional homebodies, so the idea of a second year sharing a hallway (and a microwave) with strangers was somewhat abhorrent. We scoured the classifieds for apartments, and finally found a satisfying prospect on the corner of a quiet street on the edge of campus.
I waited until the day before we signed our lease to tell my parents, Catherine Coyne Weissmann ’90 and Scott Weissmann ’89. As Cornell alums, they understood the absurd timeline of Collegetown apartment hunting: it all happens quickly, and very far in advance. I slipped into conversation the details of next year’s pad—parking pass included!—complete with address.
Mom stopped me. Did I remember that she’d lived across from my father when she was a student? Sure. Did I know where she lived back then? No, I didn’t.
As it turned out, I had signed on to live in the same building where my mother had lived for three of her undergraduate years—in the same apartment, on the same floor, in the very same room.
Because Ithaca is teeming with student apartments, each retelling of our Great Coincidence over the next few months garnered impressed eyebrow-raises. “What are the odds?” our friends would say, followed by a suggestion to try our luck with a lottery ticket. Upon receiving my keys the following August, I took my mother along for move-in. I watched her eyes light up with remembrance of her old home, listened to her stories about how that table is exactly the same and this bed is against the other window now. As my mother tugged my mattress below the window that she insisted would get the most sun, my roommate and I glanced nervously at the aging kitchen appliances.
Photos provided.
I lived in that apartment for a year. It was old, often stale smelling, with chipped wooden dressers and peeling paint on the walls. When my roommate and I noticed the sulfurous odor of a gas leak and our stove was removed for two weeks, my mom recalled the dozens of plates of pasta she’d undercooked in that kitchen, and the pesto chicken recipe—the one that I cite as my favorite meal of hers—that she’d perfected and served my dad when they were dating. When the temperature dropped and I complained that heat worked too slowly, she warned me of how hot the apartment would be in the summer, how she wore loose T-shirts to keep cool. When we noticed the sloping floor by the entrance, she remarked how its shape had created a perfect spot for her L.L. Bean boots—the ones now stored in my own closet. And when the leaves fell and ice blocked our path to class, my mother reminisced about her own walk to campus: “Half these buildings didn’t exist when I was there!”
From the foyer to the fire escape, our tiny apartment was a breeding ground for my mother’s stories. Slowly, I began to understand more about the young life of the woman I wanted so desperately to be like. It was like looking through a black-and- white lens of the past, imagining my mom rereading lecture notes on the couch or falling asleep under the same ceiling, taking the same running trails or hauling Wegmans bags up the same four flights of dank-smelling stairs.
I no longer live in that apartment; I traded it for a newer model closer to campus. But where it fell short in its amenities, it made up for in history.