Move-in day at college. What a scene. I remember mine well: my mom and dad with me at the University of Utah at good old Austin Hall (may she rest in peace). While my dad helped me bring in the stuff we had just hauled across the country from New Hampshire, my mom scrubbed the hell out of every nook and cranny in my dorm room.
This move-in ritual has likely been repeated since students started moving to college. In the novel, The Diary of a Freshman (published in 1900) the protagonist, Tommy Wood, moves into a boarding room (after his mother insists on them checking on five different options) in Cambridge because he didn’t get a room inside Harvard Yard. He frets over this because, "I had the idea that if you didn't live in one of the buildings owned by the college you wouldn't feel, somehow, as if you 'belonged.'"His first days are filled with getting oriented to college life and to his new town. As I watched students trying to assemble new pieces of furniture to add to their diminutive dorm rooms I thought of Tommy trying to help his neighbor, Duggie, assemble his new bed that had been delivered. "We tried of about half an hour to make the bed stand up. It looked simple enough..." but, well you can imagine the rest.
Tommy's mother helps clean his room even and moves his bed away from the window so he won’t catch cold. As soon as she leaves to catch the train home, he moves the bed back so he can see the goings on of his new town.
I'm sure lots of new students were moving their beds back to where they wanted as soon as they saw mom and dad's tail lights pulling out of the parking lot.
