The year is 2016, early fall/late summer, a warm August day. A group of bright, young women eagerly rush up the stairs (only one flight, thank goodness) to their much-anticipated Drake suite. This would be their new home. With gorgeous watercolors adorning the walls and a few emoji beanbags strewn across the common room floor, they would soon find themselves truly happy, loving the place.
They swiftly unlock the suite door, revel in the newfound space of an actual suite, open their individual room doors, and there it is. Behold, the predator. It's spreading its nimble body across the entire ceiling, leeching onto the ample surface area above, painting itself across the once white purity that was the popcorn paint. Mold. Black mold, to be exact. Structural, probably. Not a mere surface stain. Where did it come from? Nobody quite knew. This was its residence now; the battle had begun.
Days pass. Weeks, even. The mold goes largely unnoticed by our studious selves, as we choose instead to occupy our minds with settling in, decorating and unpacking every last box, and growing accustomed to our new schedules. What even was it on our ceiling, anyway? And why would I care about it when, at 2 a.m., I am struck by a strange movement out of the corner of my eye, incidentally at the top of my wall inching toward the mold. A bug. Not just any bug, though. This thing has pinchers. How adorable. I swiftly go in for the kill, striking the beast with my ten-ton anthology of poetry. Thank you, Emerson, not only for writing about nature, but for helping me kill it.
Long story short, more bugs are found, and I'm compelled to call Buildings and Grounds to inquire about the possibility of spraying. I am told there's (shockingly!!!!) nothing that can be done about the bugs, and so I casually mention the presence of mold in our rooms. Mold that, you know, was labeled by our CLs as "needs immediate attention" weeks before we moved in, but was (deliberately?) ignored. This incites an immediate response. That very night, our once innocent suite becomes a boiling cesspool of concern. Custodians, Environmental Health and Safety guys, a mold investigator, Residential Life, and Campus Safety officers rush to our room to scope out the scene. In the midst of the menagerie of conflicting opinions and suggestions about how to get rid of the mold, one thing was for sure: some kind of action had to be taken.
And so it was. Initially, we were told to just wait it out and maybe even sleep in the common room for a night or two, but eventually, we learned we would actually have to move out of the dorm into temporary housing. For an entire month.
For myself and my roommates, these past few weeks (and the present) would go down in history as The Great Mold Scare of Sophomore Year. Despite the hardships and hassles and stress that this caused us, it wasn't entirely bad. It was, more than anything, a bonding experience for the four of us. How many other roommates can say they've been through something like this?
In this narrative overall, it's not about the mold or humidifiers or packing up our stuff. It's about the resilience, optimism, support, and assertiveness we all learned we had to possess. It was about growing closer and learning to rely on each other for friendship and comfort. It was about playing Webkinz until 1 a.m., laying on the floor of our temporary housing just taking naps after a rainstorm, stealing ice cream from Frank for movie nights after a stressful week. We learned to demand what we deserve residentially and voice our concerns about our living conditions.
Interestingly enough, despite the hardships, we really did grow closer. We learned to respect and admire each other's diverse interests and range of majors, to grow accustomed to each other's different schedules. Even though I would be initially reluctant to say something positive came out of this entire ordeal, it did teach me to stay optimistic in any situation, like most hardships do. Yes, it's a first-world problem compared to a lot of things that could have happened to us. And, yes, we're still caught in the middle of it. But it teaches us that you can't control a lot of things that happen in your life, and sometimes all you can do is simply live with it and hope for the best.
Rupi Kaur, a feminist poet who recently performed a reading at Colgate, writes that “we all move forward when we recognize how resilient and striking the women around us are.” So overall, the luckiest of us, and I think many of us, can relate to this quote. For me, in light of this whole residential living crisis, the quote is about roommates and close friends who inspire us to be better people, to not overreact about small things, to strive to excel, to laugh in the face of stress, and to just relax.
