The dining room and my bedroom look like the figurative bomb went off this week, as I am busy readying kit and gear for two dorm rooms for two teenagers whose attention is elsewhere. They are leaping into the ocean, learning how to eat escargots, and combing their hair in new styles before the bathroom mirror while I stay up late, late, late past my bedtime each summer night, monitoring the price on a secondhand blowsy-blue-rose duvet cover that looks exactly like the $159 one from LoveShackFancy.
Decorating a bedroom is, for me, one of the pleasanter chores of parenthood — a delight, in fact — and it occurs to me this is probably the last time I’ll have that parental privilege. After this, most likely (and God willing, I suppose), there will be no more adorable muslin curtains scattered with tiny pink nosegays ordered from Japan after a painstaking search on Etsy; no more ingeniously sourced throw pillows with block-print shams direct-ordered from India for $12 and stuffed with real-down inserts from the Bargain Box.
One set of dorm decor is for my daughter, who is going off to college in Washington, D.C., with some reluctance; the other is for my son, who has accepted an invitation (last minute) to hie himself to boarding school at Dublin, New Hampshire, and is doing so with a facade of reluctance that doesn’t mask his growing enthusiasm. His thoughts are not on trigonometry or who his future roommate will be revealed to be, but on visions of himself sailing in a brisk mountain wind at his back across Dublin Lake.
The budget demands that we play that thrifty game of “Shopping From Your Own Closet,” or, I should say, “shopping from the back of the storeroom and in the dustiest reaches of the barn, where boxes of things ‘n’ stuff linger from when we moved back into this family home six years ago.” That hip-high wicker basket with handles will make a chic clothes hamper for Daughter, and Son has agreed that the ginormous beanbag chair covered in what looks like woolly mammoth hide, which no one ever sat in here in our playroom, will be a soft landing when he flops down to read assignments for English 10 or, more likely, to daydream about whatever 15-year-old boys daydream about (don’t ask, Mom!) while listening to Kendrick Lamar with one ear bud. The question for this afternoon is, will the heffalump-size beanbag chair fit into the back of our Honda when we depart for New England at dawn on August 23?
It’s a miracle these teenagers still let their mother choose furnishings for them and a relief that my choices so far have been met with approval. Teddy actually cracked a smile when I unfurled the map of the world, in full color and eight feet in length, that I found for $5 in the Ladies Village Improvement Society garage. His only request is that the color palette be restricted to a manly, minimalist gray, which is less fun than the Laura Ashley-revival look — the ribbons and faded florals reminiscent of the Lady Di era that are in vogue among Daughter’s cadre — but with which, it turns out, a decor-obsessed parent can still make hay. I’m particularly pleased with a gray plastic milk crate I found that he can store things in under his dorm bed.
Strangely enough, I don’t much like shopping for myself. I would never invest this much obsessive time — or any money whatsoever — buying furnishings for my own room.
On reality television these days, the contestants on “The Bachelor” or “Love Island” always ask one another about their “love language.” Lounging about in bikinis and running one hand up and down one another’s hairless limbs, they say things like, “My love language is physical touch,” or “My love language is acts of service.” I put my snobbish foot down (I’m a snob down to the soles of my Salt Water Sandals) and flatly refuse to investigate where this “love language” business came from — what corny self-help book? — or how the jargon came to be absorbed so completely into pop culture that it is commonly referenced by grown adults as if it were true and concrete, like blood type or body-mass index. But, it seems obvious, my “love language” is giving gifts and, specifically, the gift of soft furnishings for my loved ones’ nests.
Other than anticipated issues with clothes-closet space to be faced by a certain petite person with a big personality when she reaches her dorm in the heat of a blazing August in D.C., adjusting to the confines of a narrow dorm room should not be a problem for Daughter and Son. The bedrooms upstairs in our own home are like berths on a ship: much smaller than you would find in the average American home more recently constructed. Cozy. The wind outside the windows on a winter night like the wind of the North Atlantic. We haven’t quite reached the moment when they return to their small berths on Edwards Lane only as visitors. Indeed, I do not anticipate that day ever coming. We’re not one of those families that makes you walk the plank when you turn 18. Heaven forbid. They are setting sail, but these rooms will always be their rooms and, I anticipate, they will like it as much as a warm embrace when they return home as young adults to find the Swedish garden-print wallpaper hasn’t changed, or the old-fashioned roller shades, or the bolster in cornflower-blue ribbon stripes.