When you walk down my hall in my dorm on campus, you will see shoes stacked on either side of the door frames. Though my shoes are not among those sitting in the hall, the sight of snowy boots left sitting in our hallway makes me ridiculously happy. Why? Because it’s a sign of something much greater than snow.
To my knowledge, no other hall on campus leaves boots laying out the way we do. When people from other parts of campus walk through our hall, we hear verbal exclamations of confusion. “What’s up with these shoes?” “Why is everyone leaving their shoes out?”
There is one simple reason, and that is practicality. It makes no sense to wear muddy, snowy boots into your room and leave tracks all over. So you take your boots off when you get to your room and you leave them sitting by the door. This is not an uncommon phenomenon; I am sure that you are familiar with the basic procedures of removing shoes to keep from tracking in mud or snow. People living in every other dorm on campus wear boots and walk through snow and take their boots off when they get to their rooms and don’t want to mop up boot prints later. The difference: Everyone else on campus stacks their boots inside their rooms.
There are a few theories on why my hall behaves differently. One is that it’s an old building and the rooms are a little smaller than they are elsewhere, so people find it useful to save space. But what seems to me a far more powerful reason why our hall does this and none of the others do is the sense of security and community within this, the smallest dorm on campus. Our hall leaves their boots out because we trust each other.
The sight fills me with joy.