My name is Molly Elizabeth Houck Hawkins ’01 and this is my Southwestern story. SU was only a two hour drive from my home in Boerne, Texas. It was far enough away from home to feel like I was on my own, yet close enough to know that I could go home if I ever needed to. But it didn’t take long to make Southwestern feel like home. I made two great friends immediately when I started school. Christine and Meli were on my floor on First Kurth. We hit it off and even adopted a stray cat outside our dorm room together. We would eat together every day in the Commons—that’s what we had before they tore it down and built the McCombs Center my sophomore year at SU. Had they decided to do this one year earlier, my life would be completely different.

You see, in the old Commons was the SU post office, much smaller than the current one; so small that every student had to share a mailbox with another student. Aaron Hawkins ’01, also a freshman, shared that mailbox with me, and boy did he get on my nerves! You know all that on-campus mail you get inviting you to this or that or telling you to protest this and join another thing? Apparently, Aaron found it quite annoying and decided he would just ignore it. When he’d check his mail, he would take out the “good stuff,” and put all the rest of the “junk mail” back in the box. This left me to sort through it every week and dispose of his mail that had advertised things long past just to make room for new mail.

We didn’t actually meet until December just before our first semester’s finals. Mutual friends brought us together one evening when studying for finals (at the Phi Delta Toga Party). And what started that night as a playful argument over who leaves mail for too long and who throws away someone else’s mail, ended in a classic SU romance. Aaron and I graduated May 2001 and married the following October. We both developed many friendships at SU that we know will last a lifetime. But it’s strange to think that if we had not been “mailbox mates” for that one year, we may never have found each other. We’ve been married five years now and have a beautiful baby girl. Hopefully, one day she’ll find love like we have, maybe even at Southwestern.