White-tailed deer bounding across 100 acres of snow-covered grass and overweight badgers waddling along hidden river bank corners would be the scene on a winter weekday morning if the Sisters of the Holy Cross hadn’t founded this place in 1844. Or maybe there’d be a shopping center. Instead, brilliant professors are rolling down The Avenue in their Indiana license-plated vehicles and gorgeous girls with no makeup on are shuffling in snow boots en route to Spes Unica hall. Squirrels with no personal space boundaries are chasing them, trying to catch dropped Cheerios and the cold air is making everyone’s noses bright red. The sun is shining just perfectly between the bare branches of the trees lining the library walkway and you wonder, “Where I am and how did I get here?” This place…so simplistic in the early morning, but yet incredibly perfect. This is Saint Mary’s.
The campus is made up of small classrooms with swivel chairs and white walls with the exception of a beautiful crucifix and maybe, if you’re lucky, a Smart Board of some sort, like all other Catholic colleges in the country…but a special dorm we call home is about five stories high, in the style of a castle, and all manner of strange, girly gossip and talks about feelings are going on up between those walls. In the corner room right above the entrance doors fit for royalty, five freshmen girls are discussing their first dorm party, something only students in the Notre Dame area really, truly appreciate. You think about the women who used to live in that room 50 years ago, thinking how one of them is probably your best friend’s mom. Back in 1947, someone who could be your roommate’s grandma probably wrote her senior comp right there beneath that window looking out at the ND dome, though she probably called it something other than a “comp”.
But it’s 2015. So there you are… sitting on a dedicated bench on the The Island scrolling through your Instagram, and the air around you is getting frigid as the sun disappears behind the South Bend permacloud when suddenly you look up, and there, right smack in front of your face is a goose the size of your little sister begging you for some of that Sabra hummus you picked up from Cyber. You run away, and sprint through the side doors of the castle…each step inside those double doors feeling like a hug that you’ve come to ignore because now LeMans is just your known safe place. You think nothing of it, usually. You get up via the rickety elevator to your floor and overhear all these young voices. Two sophomore girls in the 3rd annex are deciphering the meaning behind a text message from someone across the street with nice hair, smart, sweet words, and really pretty eyes. The text the girls are talking about probably means the opposite of what they think it does and you know better, but they’ve got to figure that out for themselves. You turn to the left and stroll down the hallowed halls, glancing at all the black and white, wood-based frames of pictures on the walls depicting the women who once walked beneath the elaborate chandeliers you’re currently admiring. Looking at how happy they were…with skirts down to their ankles and dark hair in frizzy bobs, laughing with each other while riding on some sort of chariot-looking type of car, you think, “They didn’t have to worry about text messages.”
When you exit the building, you watch as a group of six juniors try on their class rings, those beautiful things with the diamonds that serve as a parent’s birthday/Christmas/Valentine’s Day/Easter present all in one. These girls are usually crying over their intense course load and the due date of their (second) major submission forms, but today they’re smiling and trying to get the perfect Snapchat of their frigid fingers. They may be in parkas down to the ground and shivering to the bone, but they’re giddy.
Not just anyone can handle this place– the possibility that your emotions might take ahold of you and you might actually start to love something more than you could have ever imagined. You know it with your first walk down The Avenue, when you get chills as LeMans suddenly appears before you, with the bell tower looking grand against an otherwise bland, Midwest morning sky. You know it as you watch the seniors accept their degrees, tears rolling down their faces and holding the hands of their forever friends instead of punching the sky and decorating their caps in Lilly Pulitzer prints. No, this is not a good place for those who “just want a degree.” Saint Mary’s pulls at way too many heartstrings.
Be sure to follow HCSMC on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!