A Second Home

The other night, I drove back from Bethany Beach, DE, where I spent the not-so-sunny but otherwise wonderful weekend with one of my best friends and her family. With country radio stations failing me every step of the way, I decided to check in with my W&M roommate.

Since I spent last semester in Scotland, I haven’t seen her in five months. No big deal to some roommates, but when you’ve spent the last two and a half years living mere feet away from each other every single day (minus those sad, sad summer months), it is a BIG deal. I’ll probably cry when we reunite.

Okay, enough of that. Roommate pleasantries aren’t the actual point of this story. She’s bringing furniture down to our brand new house this weekend. Midway through the conversation about the moving company, where we’ll put the old furniture, etc., she asked what I was doing.

“I’m just driving home.”

“You’re going home?!” she asked, shocked by the prospect of me driving all the way back up to PA on Sunday night when I clearly had work at 8:00 AM the next morning.

I wasn’t driving back to that home, of course. By senior year, the College is definitely your home. To be honest, I vividly remember six weeks into freshman year how we were all talking about when we’d be coming “back home” after fall break, (as if that other home was just some random place we used to live, filled with people whose features strangely mirrored our own).

Finding that sort of “home away from home” is my favorite and undoubtedly one of the most magical parts of life at the College. Just try not to let your Mom hear you say it too soon…