Our sister Ashley recently wrote a paper about AOII for an English class. It's difficult to put into words how much AOII means to us, but this does a pretty good job!
"A big white door with stained glass windows attached
to an old brick house. There’s a rectangle cover around the old doorbell
button. The button pushes in easy with age and releases an exciting deep song
of chimes, followed by the thumping of feet running down the old spiral
staircase just inside. The door swings open with squeals of its age and tire to
welcome you inside.
Just inside
the doorway is where old meets new. The lingering smell of old, such as opening
an old trunk filled with memories and secrets from your grandmother’s youth
that never fades away. The smell of new, from the fresh light blue paint across
the walls and brightly buffed wood floors mixes with the old making me feel
safe and excited. I walk forward into an opening just passed the entryway where
I can see the spiral staircase and two big entryways into two smaller rooms. My
hand skims across the plush red couch begging me to sink down into its warmth
and escape into the calming blue walls.
The first time I felt my heart fall for the house was
the day I moved in. Although I had visited it many times, the feeling wasn’t the
same as that day I arrived with all my bags. The house had just been renovated;
spruced up just in time for me to be welcomed into it. Not often is it a quiet
home. Usually it is filled with chatter and laughter, to the point you can’t
even hear your own thoughts. On the rare occasion you are there alone, sitting
in silence, you will feel the house fill you up. Although no one is around, the
ghosts of laughter and chatter from over seventy years fills the air and lives
in the walls. It is a peaceful loneliness, as if you are never alone at all.
When I picture the first voice ever in this home, I
imagine Stella George Perry, our founder. I can
hear Stella whispering excitedly words of love and sisterhood to a small
group of women. I sense authority in her voice, as she sets
standards for generations of women to come, but a strong hopefulness in her
heart. This was a time when women did not have a place on a University campus.
On a campus of predominately men, the house provided the women a place to feel
safe and secure.
These women forged a bond together to support each other’s
growth and development when no one else would support them. They would help
each other succeed intellectually, personally, and spiritually as they had
little help from anyone else. They
promised in return to devote their time to the sisterhood and through their pooled
resources and intelligence to make a difference on the campus. I can imagine a
few years later a beautiful woman with dark wavy hair, dressed in a long formal
coat, gloves, hat and heels walking up the steps toward the house for the first
time. I see this happen through the eyes of my grandpa, standing across the
street, as he has described this scene to me many times. This was the first
time he ever saw my grandma, the first and last time he fell in love.
My memories of this house are a mixture of those I’ve
heard from my grandma, and those I have experienced on my own. Bringing her to
the house now, seventy years after she lived there, reminds me of a scene from
the movie Titanic: the old woman goes back to the Titanic in the beginning
of the movie and you relive the story of her youth as if it were yesterday. The
girls in the house swarm around her as she describes her memories. She still
refers to the entry way as the necking room as this is where girls used to kiss
their dates goodbye -- boys were not allowed any further into the house. When she
tells her stories all of the girls awe over her, as the times she describes
seem much more romantic and intriguing. My grandma still imagines any formal date of mine
picking me up at the door, and walking me over to the Student Union for a dance
as she did in her day. She asks me if I get cold at night, sleeping in the
house. I never understood why she was so concerned about this. Eventually I
figured out she had to go to sleep with wet hair each night as they didn’t have
hair driers when she lived in the house, and she forgot that we have them now.
She imagines her life in the house seventy years ago to be the same as my life
in it today.
Seventy years later I am living in the same building,
with the same walls, same floors and staircase. The only thing that has changed
is the people whom fill it. Right now it is I who fills the home. I take from
it what I need-shelter, safety and security. I learn to love and cherish this
home. Soon, however, I will leave so someone else can live there and take from
it what I once did. I feel protective over my home and need to check on it from
time to time to make sure it is being cared for properly, as it always cared
for me, and those before me. It is strange to look at pictures from decades
ago, of women sitting in the house, posed in front of the same structures I
have sat at and taken my own pictures in front of countless times. It is
challenging to imagine these strangers living in my home, and feeling the same
feelings towards it as I do. It is even more challenging to imagine future
generations of women living in my home, not knowing if they will respect it or
appreciate it the way I have grown to.
This home is a historical landmark, so any physical
features of the house cannot be changed. The people inside it will come and go.
The colors will fade and change. The furniture that fills the rooms will be
moved and replaced. The core of the house, however, its walls, floors and
structures will never change. It is filled during the school year with joy and
laughter then left to rest in the summer. I imagine the walls taking this time
to soak up the laughter and chatter from the previous school year. Forever
these memories are stored in the walls and cherished, just in time to settle
and prepare for the new ones to come in the fall semester.
The home holds the lessons learned by generations of
women whom have lived there before us. It holds the tears of hundreds of broken
hearts and the giggles and whispers of hundreds of hearts that found love. It
is a home that holds people for a short period of their lives, but in some ways
the most important times. It shelters our hearts and souls while we discover
them and develop them. It provided a safe haven for our founders over one
hundred years ago, when they had nothing else. It provided my grandma a home
while at school, when her home was too far away. It provided me a legacy;
bringing me close to my grandma, through an invisible bond, for one last time
during the last few years of her life. It then sends us on our way, strong, loving
and courageous. It gives us so much but somehow still takes a small part of
each woman, storing it in its foundation to support the growth of the next
generation.
We join sororities for the privileges but are truly
shaped from them by our obligations. The longer I have been a member of the
community I realize my obligation to the other girls in the sorority, some
present but mostly those in the past. Our home was built in a time when women
vowed to support each other when they had no one else. Today it is just as
important to have women supporting women in a way that produces active members
in society whom are dedicated to charity. Hearing the respect and admiration my
grandma has in her voice whenever she speaks of an Alpha Omicron Pi woman, I
feel this obligation in my gut to act in a way to uphold her expectations. When
I look back over pictures of my grandmother throughout her lifetime I clearly
see a classy, elegantly tender and compassionate woman.
This fills my heart
with respect and admiration, as I know she became that woman through her
experiences and lessons learned in the house. Although nearly seven generations
of years have passed, and times have changed so much, the quality of lessons
and experiences have not changed. I look around me in my home, at the women
that surround me, and I see the same classy, intelligent, compassionate
features of my grandmother growing in the faces around me. I feel the same
features growing in my soul. I hope that this experience will never change in the
future generations. My heart says it won’t, but I will always be around to
check on my home, and thank it for affection it has given me. "
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