Things Left Behind: Swarthmore Students Reunited With Their Belongings
Swarthmore College student Hannah Watkins left her unfinished cross-stitch project behind last spring when she departed for what was supposed to be spring break. Photo: Hannah Watkins
When my Swarthmore College classmate Hannah Watkins was packing for spring break last year, she had better foresight than most of us. She had read about the developing public health crisis gripping China and rapidly making its way around the globe. At least for a split second, she considered the possibility that her return to campus could be delayed.
“I grabbed my favorite jewelry and my passport,” she remembers. “Just in case.”
But she couldn’t take everything to California. She tried to brush off her feeling of foreboding, telling herself that everything would be fine. She headed to the airport for what she hoped would be a week of recharging before the final rush of the semester’s end. She didn’t think any more about what she’d packed. After all, she had to leave some things behind.
Meanwhile, in her dorm room, Hannah’s desk was still filled with her beloved crafting materials: her knitting needles, her multi-colored embroidery floss, the sewing scissors gifted to her by a beading teacher. Tucked into a drawer was a project in progress, a cross-stitch that Hannah had been creating for her best friend and former roommate. Although it was unfinished, the picture sewn into the fabric, a blue and black forest scene dotted with glowing fireflies, was starting to reveal itself.
“It was a pattern we had picked together,” Hannah recalls. “Because it was soothing. It was relaxing.”
Then, abruptly, Hannah’s spring break — like the spring breaks of college students across the country — was interrupted. There were COVID warnings on every news channel, pictures of empty supermarket shelves circulating social media, and carefully worded emails about school shutdowns. Swarthmore College at first announced a temporary transition to online classes, then extended remote learning for the rest of the semester.
Hannah thought first of her friends and family, hoping they were safe. But she thought of her art supplies, too. Knitting, crocheting, quilting, and cross-stitching had become more than just hobbies to her. Crafting, in a way, was therapy. Sitting down with a project after a long day and settling in to the steady rhythm of stitching put her at ease. And now, facing all the stressors of a global pandemic, she lacked the tools that would have helped her unwind. “I kept thinking about my decision to leave all my materials behind,” she says. “I missed them terribly.”
Hannah wasn’t the only one feeling the absence of her belongings. Junior Emma Dulski returned to campus this spring doubtful that she’d be reunited with the things she’d left behind. She was happy to find that her sophomore-year roommate had saved a box of sentimental items — stuff Emma had assumed was lost after she had hurriedly departed at the start of spring break. The box held some of Emma’s winter essentials: her favorite sweaters and her menorah. The college’s move-out coordinators accidentally mailed it to Emma’s roommate in North Carolina, who kept it by her side throughout the following autumn, even as she moved among three different houses. It was February before the box made its way back to its rightful owner.
So many things were scattered last year: craft materials in the drawers of an abandoned desk and menorahs traveling across states. I myself am still trying to locate my ukulele. When I finally returned to campus and retrieved my own stranded belongings, it was nowhere to be found. I wracked my brain, then decided I must have left it at someone else’s place before spring break. I can picture myself and five or six friends crammed into a dorm room, late on some Thursday night, playing out of tune, singing off key, chatter and laughter interrupting our song. I realized that I’d probably left it there, anticipating the next impromptu jam session.
At home with my family in Cincinnati, amid the boredom and silence of seemingly endless stay-at-home orders, I kept getting an urge to make something, or do something with my hands. I’d start thinking that some strumming might cheer me up and keep my mind occupied. I’d find myself reaching for that ukulele, and then I’d remember — it wasn’t there.
After the college decided to finish the spring of 2020 remotely, it enlisted students to work as storage auditors, charging them with the task of sorting through and packing up all that had been left behind. Before I returned to Swarthmore for the spring semester, I had heard rumors that there were unoccupied dorm rooms stacked with towers of cardboard boxes, each one filled with the contents of someone’s college life. Once I was back on campus, I snuck a glimpse inside one of these rooms. You could barely open the door because there was so much piled against it: lamps, textbooks, trash bags, and Sharpie-marked boxes. They were numbered: 11 out of 20, 12 out of 20, 13 out of 20. Those labels were written reminders of just how many belongings had been deserted in the dorms.
Hannah herself worked as an auditor. “It was weird,” she recalls. “It’s such an intimate, private thing to go through someone else’s stuff.”
Many people were ecstatic to be reunited with their treasured possessions. Still, there’s something bittersweet about coming back to an object you haven’t seen in what feels like ages, and being confronted with the relics of the pre-pandemic world. The past year was filled with so much growth, both positive and painful. It’s almost like we were different people when we last held our cross-stitches and ukuleles.
In September, when Hannah unboxed her unfinished cross-stitch project, she found herself holding back tears. It had waited patiently for her since March, its loose ends and half-formed image suggestive of the sort of unraveling we’d all felt during the year. She could hardly wait to get back to work.
Once she completed the nearly 10,000 stitches that made up the design, she gave the finished project to her friend as a belated birthday present. The shadowy forest landscape, threaded through with flickers of firefly light, seemed a fitting emblem of what they had been through.
Madelon Basil is a junior at Swarthmore College majoring in English. She is interning at the Swarthmorean this spring with funding from the college’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.
