The Old College Try

Sometimes you just want to fix everything, right? And sometimes your kids know you well enough to not tell you about something until the issue has passed, so you won't try to fix it, right?

Yesterday I got a call from Rexburg. Heidi had moved into a new apartment over the weekend, unpacked and gotten settled. She didn't have any actual roommates yet, but she did have faceless piles of stuff claiming individual beds.
The weekend came and went, and Monday morning she spent helping a friend move, then spent the afternoon quadding. When she returned to her apartment late that afternoon, two voices shouted out, "Who's there?" When she responded, "Heidi," they both said, "Just the girl we wanted to see." In Heidi's absence, these two girls had taken it upon themselves to move all of Heidi's unpacked stuff into another bedroom. Because they wanted to room together. These girls are not friends from high school; they had just decided to room together, and they had uprooted Heidi while she wasn't present. I was alternately flabbergasted and mad. When asked what she did about it, Heidi said, "Nothing. I tried to think about all the positives, like I didn't have to move any of the stuff, and in a week it really won't matter much." That's my girl. My polar opposite. In the long term, I think she's probably right. It won't matter in a week. But . . . Can you even believe that? And she was plopped into a room where the roommate had already taken every drawer in the desk and five of the six dresser drawers. "What are you going to do about that?" "Probably nothing. But I really could use one more drawer." She did end up emptying one of the dresser drawers onto the girl's bed, so even though my sense of justice and fairness has not been assuaged, at least she stood up for herself a little.
She's currently annoyed with how "young" they all are. Her same age, mind you, just acting like freshmen. And she's been hanging out with the older set all summer, so she's kinda past that exuberant new stage. Hopefully they'll work it out and become great friends. I can only hope.

All of these events have given me flashbacks to my own freshman year at BYU. And although I remember being nervous and having a "small" roommate issue in the beginning, I came to truly love the five other people in my apartment. We ate dinner together every night, sat together every Sunday in Church, and I remember a few very serious games of "Truth, Double Truth, or Triple Truth." Lisa was the champion of that one! I remember driving Provo Canyon with Robin (and a few other adventures best saved for another post!), the "Garbage Collage" in our kitchen, and learning to share the bathroom with others.
It was truly one of the greatest times of my life, and I must admit to dreaming occasionally that I'm back there, finding classes and missing tests. And when I wake up, part of me longs to be back in that stage of life. Time with roommates and single college life was so short--only two years before I got married--yet it has influenced who I am in so many ways. Thanks to Lisa, Melinda, Paige, Anne, and Robin for helping me grow up from that hyper, very young freshman. You'll always have a special place in my memory. Once a Cougar, always a Cougar.