My First Room

My potential apartment mate was not arriving for a couple days, so in the meantime I was being housed in one of the college dorm rooms. I'll admit that even my adventurous heart sunk a tiny bit when I walked into an extremely dirty dorm room. I don't mind thin mattresses, peeling paint/wallpaper, or holes in the wall. But in one thing at least I am my mother's daughter: Dirt is bad.

At first I didn't want to let my new towels or sheets touch anything, but the alternative, of course, was that I had to touch things, so the linens lost out. Since my body was still adjusting to the time difference (15 hrs, by the way, from CST), and since I refused to let myself rest during the day, I was ready for a full night's sleep at about 6:00 or 7:00 each evening. On this evening, that was somewhat of a relief, otherwise I may have focused a little too much on, well, uncleanliness.

On the next day, my proper sensibilities had returned, and I realized that all this little room truly needed was a good scrub. Which I could give it.

I went to a little Chinese-American store next to the school where I picked up an extremely expensive bottle of Lysol (I would have been willing to use a non-American product, but that only came in wipes, and I needed solution for serious cleansing power). I donated one of my new clean washcloths to the project. Three hours (and a good deal of Lysol) later, I had come as far as I reasonably could. And then this curious feeling of ownership stirred inside me. Now that I had cleaned it, the room was mine. And then I began to get all Woolfian about the fact that I was all alone, and I had a lock on the door, and I could think and read and write anything without having to be disturbed. I began to smile fondly upon the wildly-leaking shower, the broken toilet seat, and the plastic picnic table. I may have still frowned at the spots I could not scrub away, but I was grinning at the wonderfulness of it all: I have a room of my own.