BRUNSWICK — Callie Ferguson shut the trunk of her Honda CR-V packed with the last load of clothes and other odds and ends, a trunk of towels and a mug of pens, from her room at 11 Potter St.
She had thought that moving out of the house she shared with four of her classmates would be the hardest part about leaving Bowdoin College, but since graduation, living there hadn’t been the same.
Everyone was either in and out, or had left for good. Their bodies and belongings gone from the house, a woody scent they hadn’t smelled since they moved in returned. The old desks and bureaus, lived-in couches and chairs, most of which had been there when the friends moved in, now sat bare of books or clothes or picture frames, making the patchwork of patterned wallpaper throughout the house pop.
Most of the housemates weren’t going far. Four of them got jobs in the Portland area and decided to live together on Munjoy Hill.
But their move-in date was two weeks after they had to be out of the house on Potter Street, forcing them to find couches to crash on and somewhere to store their stuff, leaving them in limbo between the end of college and the start of their careers.
Their last day in the house, a Saturday, Ferguson was happy to have to go to work.
After packing up her car, she headed to Allagash Brewing Co. in Portland, where she had started full-time three weeks earlier, giving tours and beer tastings. “It’s the only routine that I have,” she said.
Ferguson and two of her housemates had been friends since their freshman year, when they all lived in the same dorm. One of them, Oriana Farnham, played on the Ultimate Frisbee team, where she met the other two housemates.
All five lived together their sophomore year, but went separate ways as juniors, when several of them spent semesters abroad.
Molly Sun, one of the Frisbee players, lived in the off-campus house on Potter Street that year with teammates who were seniors, so she got first dibs on taking over the place. She sent an email to her sophomore year housemates inviting them to move in with her.
A group of women’s lacrosse players and a couple of other seniors lived in houses on the street, right across from campus, but their most prominent neighbor was next door.
“The senator is in,” they’d tell one another when someone spotted Angus King back home from Washington.
Although the housemates never got to know him, they talked about him as if they did. Their house is said to be haunted by King’s ex-wife’s mother, since a ceiling light crashed beside the head of someone sleeping in Sun’s room.
“She likes empowered women, so we’ve been fine,” Sun said, though she slept with her feet on the opposite side of the bed.
Sun, who starts her job as a health analyst in Portland in July, was the first to leave the house, then Emily Tucker, who will be working on a wind energy project and writing for a magazine in West Virginia, where the others are already planning a road trip.
Nina Underman went home to Indiana for her sister’s high school graduation and returned with time to spare before starting work as a business analyst for Maine Health in July.
Farnham, whose family lives in Germany, has mostly stayed at Potter Street, aside from some time spent at her grandmother’s house in Alfred. When Ferguson went to work that day, she was left with the last of the cleaning.
Remnants from parties past had already come down – the “Happy Birthday” banner that hung on the living room wall and the messages written on the chalkboard in the kitchen, erased and replaced with a to-do list.
Farnham dragged rugs from the common areas outside to shake them out and sweep the floors beneath them.
“I don’t even remember if these rugs are ours or came with the house,” she said.
For the week prior, Farnham had been traveling the state training for her job as a paralegal with Pine Tree Legal Assistance. Her only experience with the law before had been watching “The Good Wife,” and she was exhausted from the onslaught of information. It would be nice to settle in their new place, she said. “I wish that we were going right now.”
Farnham hadn’t felt like a college student for a while before she graduated. Living off-campus and hanging out mostly with her housemates, she, like Ferguson, thought leaving Potter Street would be more emotional than receiving her diploma.
“I had been really apathetic,” she said about going into commencement.
But she got a surprise marching around the Bowdoin quad in her cap and gown, seeing all the professors she’d had over the years and alumni lined up and looking on. She cried twice during the ceremony.
Since then, her focus has been on finding an apartment in Portland and buying a car to get to her new job. When Sun was on her way out of the house for the last time, they only had time for a quick hug.
That was weeks ago, and Farnham was still there. Wiping the stove with a sponge, she picked up a tea kettle and put it down again, unsure whether it belonged to a housemate or the house.
“The goodbye is really drawn out,” she said.
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