I remember winter in A's house in Providence. It was right after he graduated, but I was still a college senior. The apartment was not far from campus from the distances I am used to now - probably a 30 minute walk - but by how I felt at the time, it seemed absurdly far away. Two things always struck me about visiting the house: The first was how cold it was. His roommates had decided that they should turn the thermostat down to 65 to save money on heat. As a result, the living areas of the house were virtually unbearable, unless you were cooking in the kitchen or cuddling on the couch under a blanket. The front area of the living room was a sunroom of sorts, and in the winter it felt almost unprotected from the cold. One snowy evening, we sat there watching the snow, drinking port wine and hot chocolate and snuggling for warmth. Still, A's room, which had a radiator, was one of the only warm places, and I would avoid leaving there, in part for the heat and in part because it was the only room in the house where I felt like I wasn't just a guest.
The second thing was how distant it felt. This is the part that today I have a hard time understanding. Being off campus (and noticeably so) made the house feel like a foray into the real world. It was unsettling. It felt like returning to the suburbs where I had grown up, even though I knew that life in Providence had little in common with my New Jersey upbringing. Still, I feared that the sense of isolation I felt there, which I worried there was indicative of our future. Most times I was there, I was waiting until I could go back to the areas surrounding campus.
Still, there are times I spent there that felt like home: That time watching the snow; memories of cooking together in the too-small kitchen without a fan and looking out the window into the yard; talking to the young boy who just moved next door and didn't mind trying to make friends who were ten years older than him; the time A invited our friends over for a barbecue in April when it was still too cold to stay outside and grill. Those memories are the first where I thought of us as a household.
I don't know why this memory is coming back to me all of a sudden. Maybe it's because it finally snowed in DC and I can see the white glimmer of snow on our patio, reminding me of shoveling snow on A's old driveway and watching snow fall from his living room. Maybe it comes from the process of buying a new place, which makes me think of all the earlier apartments where I've spent time and felt at home. As a place where I first began to contemplate my adult life and what it might hold, it clearly left an impression on me.
