Dorm Domicile

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I began to get a giddy, guilty feeling as other mothers took a break from unpacking to peer in Room 301. We were becoming an attraction.

“Wow, this is huge! How’d you girls get so lucky?” visitor after visitor exclaimed.

“My son’s in a closet compared to this,” one mom bemoaned.

“My word! So who do you know? What strings did you pull?” another asked as she carried an orphaned bookshelf (“No room for this!”) back down to her car.

We had pulled no strings; we had none to tug. My daughter and her roommate had simply hit the dorm-lotto jackpot—a corner room with airy 12-foot ceilings, two windows, gleaming vinyl floors and two not huge but adequate Elfa-outfitted closets. The walls were supposedly “healable,” which I think is code for “hang posters with abandon,” and the beds were rigged to be lofted if so desired, which meant that with a little umph and imagination the girls could create multiple interior design scenarios. Their cheerful matching comforters, a splurge from The Company Store, were icing on the cake.

I was thrilled to see my daughter’s excitement, to observe as she laid claim to her new university home, figuring out what to put where and negotiating easily with her roommate, a friend from high school.

“We could put your desk here, mine in the corner and the refrigerator there. Or stack my drawers against this wall, then put the bookshelf in the entryway….” They were having a blast only a few hours into their college career, launching into nascent adulthood via the first frontier of domesticity. All around us the dorm and campus were buzzing with the energy and electricity of possibility. Wide-open doors, intriguing new faces, still-clean linens, the Christmas morning smell of new plastic (à la storage bins, drawers, crates) in all its Target excess and glory.

My daughter’s freshman move-in day, with minimal emotional and physical mayhem, was not exactly the chaotic stash-and-squeeze fest that had been my own experience some 30 years ago. In contrast to my daughter’s palatial dorm room, my first college abode was cramped and slightly dreary, especially on the muggy, rainy day when my mother and I first scoped it out a few weeks before the semester started. The cleaning crews were doing damage control after summer school residents had cleared out, and kindly let us in to take a peek. I was thrilled and enchanted; my mother was dismayed and depressed.